


Quantum Entanglement

by BlueColoredDreams



Series: Quantum Entanglement [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical language, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Gap Filler, Minor Canon-divergence, Slow Build, Spoilers up to current
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2018-11-23 03:49:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 42,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11394747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueColoredDreams/pseuds/BlueColoredDreams
Summary: Lucretia never intended to tie herself and the Millers so tightly together, but they were already involved in it all long before she came to them, devastated and empty-handed.





	1. Log #C99.y1.d360/Alone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been writing this since the beginning of May, y'all. I've rewritten and restructured this three times since then as stuff got kicked by canon-- the discard draft for this is just as long as the working draft. It's a trip.

**_Log #C99.y1.d360_ **

_Today is the last day. Last night I finished the redactions, I finished the re-recording. It’s done. I’m just waiting for Barry and Taako to come back, I want everyone on the ship when I do it, so I can make sure they’re safe._

_Who am I kidding?_

_I want to see them, I want to have one last dinner, I want to hug them all goodnight and have them for one more day. Just one more day, just one more. I have already found places for them all—it was difficult, but I’ve done it. I’ve taken pains to find places that they’ll be happy in, and once it’s all over, places that they can continue to make their homes if they so choose._

_I hold out, too, with the hope that this time, Barry and Taako bring Lup home, bring us some modicum of peace and joy to hold onto for our short time together. But, if they bring her back… then maybe… no._

_Soon, I will be alone.  
It doesn’t matter what happens, I will be alone._

* * *

The hardest thing she ever had to do was not the violence or the resets or the mission. It was not holding up against bandits or judiciary gods. It was not taking up the mantle of a leader. It was not standing alone against her friends.

It wasn’t copying a hundred years so precisely that nothing can eke through the cracks. It wasn’t letting Fisher gently tug each book from her fingers. It wasn’t hearing the shouts and the clatters and the cries as her family falls apart and dissolves in Fisher’s delicate tentacles.

It wasn’t Magnus’s eyes boring into her, slowly losing focus between the tears and the magic or guiding him down onto the floor, weeping as she gently pulls his gift for her from his hands. It’s not realizing what she’s done to Davenport, that she’s rendered him functionally mute and a shadow of his former self; it’s not realizing that she will have to take care of him, either. It’s not casting Sleep on all of them, so they won’t wake up while she arranges for their futures.

It’s not going topside to the deck and being unable to find Barry at all, it’s not Taako’s blasé  _‘So, I just killed a dude’_ before his eyes roll back into his head and he faints into her arms. It’s not going back, tracking the miles back to find where she could see the crater in the wheat and the familiar eagle spread of limbs and red robes. It’s not sinking to her knees on the starboard edge, hands tight against the railing as she sobs so hard she vomits into her lap. It’s not being unable to go down and retrieve the body, it’s not knowing that he’s still there, but outside of her grasp and knowing he knows and still has to live with what they did—what  _she_  did to them.

It’s not picking herself up and cleaning herself and dragging each of them to their rooms, sealing them up with spells and wards so they will not wake until she’s ready.

It’s not forging papers, transmuting money, or picking their new homes by hand.

All of those things are so, so easy compared to what comes next.

The hardest thing Lucretia ever has to do is this:

One by one, she breaks her seals.

She starts with Merle, who was the easiest to settle. She finds his family, some cosmic bonds that she doesn’t understand—she thinks that Lup and Barry had an explanation, but god, she hadn’t really paid it much mind, but she wishes she had. She kisses his cheek and urges him forwards towards the beach-side enclave. She watches with her fingers clasped tight and shaking, but he’s welcomed in, of course he is, of course.

She struggles with placing Taako, but setting him free is fairly easy. He doesn’t need encouraging, doesn’t need prompting other than giving him an apron and a bag of gold and telling him to charm everyone he meets. He lets her hug him once, face pinched in something bemused and unsettled as she nods at him and points at the stagecoach. He laughs at her as she sets her feet apart and hugs her chest tightly. He climbs aboard the stagecoach and blows her a jaunty kiss, and he’ll be fine, he’ll be fine, he’ll be  _fine_.

Then Magnus. Magnus is both the easiest and the hardest, by virtue of their last interaction. She hears his voice in her mind when she sleeps, when she eats, sees his face go slack after the shock of the betrayal is blurred out by the static of Fisher’s magic. She holds his hand as they walk up the trail to Ravens’ Roost.

He’s the most inquisitive of them, asks her questions, wants to know where and why and how and things she can’t answer.

“Your money is in this bag,” she says softly, pointing to the coin purse on his belt. “And your knives are there, too. Your name is Magnus Burnsides.”

“Yes,” he says. “I  _know_  that… but you… how do  _you_?”

“Don’t worry,” she whispers. “Your studio is in the craftsman’s corridor, right here in the map, see? Everything has been set up for the first six months, so take your time to get settled.”

“Why are you doing this?”

Lucretia shakes her head. “You needed the help,” she says simply.

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to,” she says earnestly. “Just—just… remember to be kind in turn. You’re a kind person, Magnus, you protect people. I just… I returned the favor a bit.”

He nods. She stands on her toes and despite his confusion, despite the furrow of his brow and the glaze in his eyes, he instinctively leans down and lets her kiss him on the forehead. Her hands shake as she gently pushes the map of Raven’s Roost into his hands. “You’ve got it from here, big guy,” she whispers. “You’ll be okay.”

“Yeah. Thank you—who… who are you again?”

But Lucretia has already activated her teleportation spell, and she’s gone, materializing on the bridge of the Starblaster in the center of her carefully traced circle of sigils, tears on her face and hands shaking.

That’s all of them, that’s all of them that she can help.

* * *

“I’m going out,” she says softly, touching the glass with the tips of her fingers. “I’ve left things for you to have and play with while I’m gone—the top of the tank is open for you if you want to come out to play in the ship. Please don’t use them all at once; I don’t know when I’ll be back. Dav will be around, okay, so you won’t be alone.”

Fisher flips their tendrils at her, agitated.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. And she means it. She loves Fisher with all of her heart, but this is what she has to do. She presses her palms to the tank and leans her forehead against the glass. She closes her eyes and tries not to cry.

She can’t afford to be weepy anymore, to be over-emotional. She has to keep it inside, keep it under control. She has a mission she has to accomplish.

The faster she can get it done, the faster she can get the rest of her friends back to her. She has to leave Fisher and Davenport behind, as much as it hurts her to do it. The few comforts they provide her are a continual balm to her soul, but she cannot take them where she is going, she  _cannot_.

She knows how to find the staff, and it’s going to be a bitch to get it back, but she’s got to do it; it’s a start, a real one, and she can’t put them in danger.

“Be good,” she says softly. “I’ll be back.”

She steps back from the tank and turns, lip between her teeth. She leaves Magnus’ room, where she'd moved Fisher so they'd be happy, and slowly closes the door, bracing her back against it. She inhales deeply, trying to steady herself.

She goes to the kitchen, where Davenport is puttering around. She’s relieved that, despite the mental damage the redaction has caused, he can take care of himself fairly well. He’s taken an interest in cooking, of all things—and she’s done little to discourage him from that. She doesn’t know why it’s cooking and not crafting or something in the arts, she actively avoids thinking about it, but he’s happy when he does it. It keeps him fed, at least, when she’s gone.

She doesn’t know what she would do otherwise, when she goes out to look—she can’t take him with her and she can’t knock him out when she leaves. She does, however, make sure the barriers on the ship are set so he and Fisher can’t slip out after her—they did it the first time she’d left, and she’d been hysterical with fear and rage and guilt that they’d trailed after her like children, the reality of it sinking in.

“Dav,” she says softly, watching him reorganize the cabinets for the tenth time that week. It’s a nonsensical pattern he works by, one that puts the mustard with the sugar and the butter in the freezer, but Lucretia thinks it soothes him to do it, so she doesn’t change a thing. “I’m going out. I’m gonna bring you back some tea, the kind you like, and we’ll sit and drink when I get back.”

She goes to her room, and begins to gear up. She changes out of her red coveralls, grungy and soft with wear and sets it on her bed, tracing a light finger against the embroidered patch. For so long, she’d been a member, one of seven.

And now, she has to go it alone again. 

She closes her eyes and turns her back to it, taking a deep breath. She opens them and redresses in a nondescript set of cloth pants that she tucks her blouse into. Leather boots with thick soles that have enough room for her to push a knife into one, her spare wand into the other.

She buckles a belt over her stomach, one with enough pockets to fit the most important of her supplies, the vials of potions, a small bag of coin she’d transmuted after sneaking around the nearby town to find out what the currency of the world looked like, a sewing kit and sturdy thread that would work not only on cloth, but skin. Components for her more difficult spells and the small hip-purse that contained a mostly blank journal. Her shitty short-sword. She buckles a quiver of arrows over her shoulder, the bow sitting snugly against her back.

Over all of this she swings her robe over her shoulders. She runs her fingers over the heavy material, the brass buckles, and mourns the loss of its original crimson. She loves her robe, loves the Institute still, and hated having to change the color of it.

But red is  _so_  striking, too easy to pick out in a crowd, and their robes had been manufactured to withstand spells and fire and repel water—her robe had saved her from many an untimely death, and even though she was loath to dye it, she was even more reluctant to part with it.

It’s now an unassuming washed-out black. She misses the red already. 

She misses her friends. She misses their laughter and their anger and their voices.

But she did what she had to in order to carry on. And she’ll continue to do it.

She pats herself down once more, doing a mental inventory. She swings her arms wide, does lunges, jumps, and does a roll out into the hallway, testing her range of motion.

Everyone always laughed when they suited up like this, laughed at Magnus ducking and running before he had to, but it’s useful. Better to find out something doesn’t fit right and look silly in the ship than to find out in battle and die.

And Lucretia has no plans of dying. She has to find the Relics first, she has to figure out how to put the Light back together by herself, has to turn it into a generator for the spell she has planned, has to put it into place, and then she has to gather her friends. It’s no small task, but she’s done things she thought were impossible before.

She kisses Davenport on the forehead, and he hugs her tightly, and her heart squeezes as she looks into his eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “It’s just for a short time.”

She steps out of the ship, prepared to face Faerun alone.


	2. Log #C99.y2.d200

**_Log #C99.y2.d200_ **

_I’ve found the staff. I’d thought, recklessly, that what I would find would not be too bad, the stories are all just—I thought it was nothing compared to—_

_I was foolish._

_All I had to do, all I had to do was walk in… and… take it._

_It was a child, it was a child—_

_A child_

_Did_

_That_

**_I did that._ **


	3. From Outside Harm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've taken... lots... and lots... and lots of liberties with legitimate D&D elements. Prismatic Wall and Shifting Jellies are legit things, but... UH.  
> Also, hit me up on my tumblr-- same screenname!  
> 

The search for the Bulwark Staff is fairly straightforward. When she made it, she made sure that it could be found easily by those who wanted to protect those they held most dear—not because she knew she was going to go out looking for it, but because she wanted to make sure it ended up with people who, if it _had_ to be used, would know temperance, know kindness. If there was someone who wholeheartedly wanted to protect their families and hearts from harm, who wanted to find something that could help them, they would find themselves drawn to her staff. It was a stopgap, it was born of fear, but it was the only thing she could do.

The second she steps foot onto Faerun’s soil with the intentions of going after it, it tugs on her like a siren’s call. She feels it in the pit of her gut, right under her sternum. She wants to save them all so badly, and it pulls her.

She walks, she runs, she hitchhikes. Miles of the continent slip past her as she follows the call, a silent, wordless plea for her creation, for her friends, for the people whose hands brush her own as she pays for meals, for lodging. For the bandits she has to fight, the monsters she has to blast away, for the days she goes sleepless and hungry, her feet sore and her body dirty. 

She’s doing it for them, it was always for all of the people they ever came in contact with. These people are who she’s abandoned her family to save, these are the people who ripped themselves apart for their creations, these are the people they made a judgement call for and failed them, these lives are the lives that they wanted to save, the place they wanted to call their home, and that’s what pulls her forward. 

When the call becomes a roar in her ears, when it becomes clear that she’s close, she stops to think. 

She’s close; she’s _so_ close to it. It’s easy to think she could strike out blindly, but she knows that doing so is dangerous. It could even be fatal, the memory sticking in her throat like glue—the scrawled out letters on a scrap piece of paper that has equations on the back, laid out on the kitchen table and…

She marks off the current village as a possibility. She would know. She finds the town’s general store and buys herself a map, studying it intently by the side of the main road. The staff is decidedly not here, but it’s also close enough that she can _feel_ it. That leaves a rough hundred-mile radius, and five villages she’ll need to check. First, she thinks, she’ll start talking to the townsfolk.

She rubs her temples and sighs, folding up her map. It’s just past noon; she’s got time to kill. Might as well start so she can get it all over with. She walks down the dusty main road, tamping down the tingling itch to run, to blindly go towards where she’s being called to.

She stops in shops, chats with the locals to gain an idea of the area—a lumber town, sleepy and mostly untouched by the civil unrest that plagued the entire continent during the Relic Wars (no one refers to them as that, but she has to still her own tongue on the words when she speaks), no one wanted their trades or their town, but they served as an outpost for the militia. A few towns over to the west had it worse—they mined coal and iron and smelted steel, and didn’t last the war. Neither did the town to the north, whose primary trade was magic items made from an abbey in the mountains.

These stories mark her mind:

Magic items, fighting, towns just _gone_ —all hallmarks of a relic. Her relic. The first step.

She opens up the map again, biting her lip. The sun is starting to sink down the horizon, but the leads she has are _so_ promising. She can start on the main track tonight, camp off the side of it, and make headway once the moon has risen. She has plenty of provisions and water and she’d refilled her quiver and bought a new string for her bow.

It's a plan, she decides, skimming the map again as she walks.

She folds it back into her cloak when it grows too dark to memorize the lines and borders of Faerun on this map—they’re all so _different;_ each region has different borders and towns based on when the map was first printed. She shrugs her bow off of its holster and slips her arm through it for easy use. The area is rural, with cows and horses kneeling in their pastures for the night, far-off farmsteads glittering to her left among the foothills of the mountains. People mill in the fields, finishing the last of their work for the nights.

To her right, the woods loom, a prime haven for monsters and brigands.

There’s no one on the road besides herself; she’s hailed along the road by farmers here and there, but she waves them all off despite their skepticism with her journey. 

It’s by complete accident that she notices what happens next—something slides out of the woods, low and too strangely lumpy to be an animal.

Lucretia freezes, brow furrowed as she squints at the dark shape. It moves oddly—not smoothly enough to be some sort of snake or tentacle-beast.

The shape rises in the middle of the road, elongating and morphing into a human shape; she fumbles with her bow in her shock, sending it clattering along the road. She swears. 

The humanoid figure turns its head towards her and grins, a patch of damp red spreading across its simple cloth pants, an arrow materializing in its leg. It limps towards the field, shouting as it stumbles to the fence that borders the gully and the farmland.

A dwarven man turns in the field and pulls a sword from his belt. “Hail! Who goes there?”

“Hel-help me!” it cries in Common. “A bandit—she—”

The man squints and Lucretia shakes her head, drawing her sword as well, “No—sir, no—it’s from—”

“You have to help me,” the thing cries, clutching its leg. It lunges for the dwarf, face twisting into something eerie, mouth too wide and elastic. 

Lucretia drops her sword, drawing her wand instead, “Oh, _duck_!” she cries as she casts magic missile at the thing.

Each dart lands home, and the figure stumbles backwards. Its hands morph into claws and slashes forwards towards the dwarf, and she tries to fire off another round of missiles at it, but they fly over its head.

“The hell!” she shouts, running forward to scoop up her bow. The dwarf launches over the fence as the thing turns towards her, throwing his pitchfork blindly at the thing. It barely even stumbles.

She draws her bow and fires; the arrows sink into it but it keeps moving forward.

“The hell!” she repeats, falling backwards.

“Shifting jelly!” the dwarf shouts, firing off a few rounds of missiles himself. “If it ain’t silver, ain’t gonna cut it!”

Lucretia rolls out of its way as its claws scythe down; one catches her robe and she rips it off of herself, hands clutching her wand. She throws up a barrier, the strongest one she can pull up, the most familiar, the one that she used against the Hunger when they needed to get to the ship. The slime bangs against it, half human and half a gelatinous ooze.

“Nice barrier there, missy but that ain’t gonna do much,” the dwarf grunts, scowling at the slime. “How long y’got?”

“Um,” Lucretia pants, “S-step back—the barrier will drop in a second—”

She upends her bag into the dirt. “Here we go,” she whispers to herself, rummaging—it takes precious moments to grab what she needs from her bag for the spell Lup had taught her ages ago when she realized that she would have to _fight_ not just defend.

She shakes the dust off of the sumac leaf and mutters the invocation, unconsciously mimicking Lup. The leaf catches fire the second the barrier drops and the slime lurches towards her. She grits her teeth flicks her wrist the way she’s supposed to and the leaf twists in her fingers to form a scimitar-like blade of fire, and she slashes the hands of the slime off of its wrists as it darts forwards.

And again, before the new set of claws can reform from its smoking arms, she twists and cuts a wide arc through it. It grabs its longsword off of its back as it shifts a new pair of hands, cursing at her, and she parries, the heat from the spell making her sweat.

The claws catch her, and she grunts, feeling the burn of poison on her skin, but she feels something cool touch her skin, and dimly, she realizes the dwarven farmer has cast something on her—a buff, or a healing spell, and she pushes forwards, hacking at it indiscriminately, both hands tight against the pommel of her blade as she tries to keep her concentration on keeping the spell going, on getting the hits in, on dodging back. 

Magnus would be absolutely ashamed of her form, but she manages well enough, winded and covered in slashes as the slime disintegrates into a puddle of shimmering goo.

“Well, fuck me,” the dwarf growls. “We’ve been trying to get rid of that thing all day. Keeps eatin’ our damn cattle—tried to go after one of my oldests this mornin’. And you just swooped right on in.”

“Oh,” Lucretia says faintly, voice high and shaking. “ _Oh_.”

“Up y’get.” He reaches down and hauls her to her feet, “M’name’s Boyland. You are?”

“Lucretia.”

“Well, then, Lucretia. What’re you doin’ on the road right before nightfall?”

Lucretia starts to right herself, pushing her hair back with one bloodied and dirty hand. “I’m looking for something,” she says absently. “Those—those don’t form unless there’s powerful magic concentrated nearby.”

“Had plenty o’ that these past few years. Now if y’re on a quest, ain’t nothin’ helpin’ that, but I will say it ain’t safe.”

“Sir—”

“Boyland.”

“Boyland,” Lucretia corrects, a small smile tugging on her lips. “Is anything safe these days?”

The dwarf is silent for a moment, then laughs, clapping her on the back. “Right y’are!” He reaches inside his coat and pulls out a cigar, sticking it in his mouth without lighting it. “Now, what exactly is it that y’re questin’ after, Lucretia?”

Lucretia is quiet for a moment, leaning down to pick her robe up off of the ground. She folds it over her arm and looks over at Boyland. “Well… The map, um, it says there’s a town, nearby. But there are no signs on the main road, and—the road noted on my map seems to have fallen into disrepair. It should have started a few miles back, but I can't find it. I’m trying to… reconcile maps with what’s actually around.” 

The dwarf looks up at her, chewing on the end of his cigar. “Yeah, there was,” he drawls. “It just up and disappeared during the skirmishes for the mills and shit. Why?”

Lucretia shakes her head. “It’s just an attempt to chronicle what happened,” she murmurs. “I’m a historian, of a sort.”

Boyland nods. “Got a lot of stuff like that these days. Everyone just went nuts, towns disappeared, changed names, changed hands, all that. Got some greedy people in power, and they all wanted more and more resources. Happens.”

She nods, looking towards the trees the ruined roads must spill into. “I must be on my way,” she sighs.

Boyland looks towards the sky, and then shakes his head. “Nope, missy. It’s too late for travel. Family’ll have my hide if I let you wander off into the night, especially when I tell ‘em you took care of that slime for us.”

“Oh, oh no, I can’t impose,” Lucretia murmurs.

He laughs and claps her on the back; “There’s a lot of us, what’s one more person? And y'saved my ass with that spell work, the least I can do is put y’up for one night.”

Lucretia wants to decline, but Boyland’s gruff face is set and he’s already gently nudging her towards the edge of the road and he reminds her a bit of Merle with his stubbornness and Magnus with his rough kindess. She laughs; “If you absolutely insist.”

She spends the night surrounded by what she could only describe as a self-contained commune—all related to Boyland directly. Sons and daughters and wives and ex-wives and their familes—it’s almost comical how many people there are. The food is good and the scent of cigar smoke drifts in and out with fresh bread and spiced rum, and they’re kind, they’re _so_ kind that Lucretia sleeps solidly for the first time in months, knowing that people like this are why she did what she did.

Boyland sees her off the next morning, and her pack is filled with new rations, new components, and a spare bedding roll and a chain of flowers rests on her wrist where the smallest of Boyland’s toddler daughters had slipped it over her hand with a toothy grin, whispering her thanks for the show of lights that Lucretia had put on for them the night before.

“Come back and see us now,” he says as he waves her back down the road, puffing on his cigar. “We don’t see many strangers as kind as you these days. You’ll be welcomed back.”

She waves and trots off, unaware that he watches after her until she disappears from sight.

She follows the ruined trail he pointed out to her to the town on the map. Rocks and vines and bramble twine over the old track; once, she could tell it was well defined. Loose stone lines the borders of it, wide enough for a single coach, or two horses, across, tree branches canopying overhead. A stream runs parallel to the old road, bright and sparkling in the greenish light of the forest.

As she gets close to the place where the town should be, she starts feeling unsettled. She can’t put her finger on it exactly, but her skin prickles, her heart races, and her fingers begin to twitch. Something presses against her, a presence she can’t begin to describe. The tug in her gut strengthens so much that she fights against the urge to kneel forward and vomit. She stumbles to the edge of the track and braces herself up against a tree, chest heaving. Magic bears down on her, and she knows something is reading her, reading her thoughts and her desires and it combs through them all, even the ones that people shouldn’t be able to pluck from her—and—and she— there’s something _wrong_.

There are no animals moving, she realizes. There are no birds singing, no rustling of branches, no chattering squirrels. The ambient sounds are just… _gone_. 

She stumbles back the way she came, and then, like lifting a sheet, she’s fine again. A bluebird trills nearby, and the gurgling of the stream resumes. Her thoughts are her own again.

She shakes in a mix of fear and adrenaline. This is it, it has to be. It’s in use, it’s nearby, and someone’s using it, and she trembles. She doesn’t want to fight, but she draws her short-sword anyway, and creeps forward.

The same feeling hits her again, a ripple of terrible unease. Whoever is using it must be scanning people for intent. She focuses on the memories of her friends, of her family, of how much she loves them and inches forward. The pressure eases, and she picks up her pace.

She starts to notice that the grass is brown and dry. Trees cling to their leaves like it’s autumn, black and brown and withering. Branches cover the track, splintered and dry and petrified with dried out mushroom caps.

She picks over them, and she starts to catch the tell-tale whiff of decay on the air. As she walks, it becomes thicker, more cloying. She steps on the body of a dead bird without realizing, cringing back from the mummified remains.

She nudges it with her sword and it crumbles away, dry sinew and feathers. Her stomach starts to roil and her mouth goes dry.

“No,” she whispers. She speeds her pace, eyes sweeping the deadened forest lane—a deer, striped to bare bones. More dead birds. She can see light up ahead, shimmering in rainbowed hues, the edges of a prismatic wall, a spell she knows well.

Panic overtakes her, and she runs into the barrier full-force, thinking that she’s passed the test for passage into it, that it would let her in since she’s its maker’s origin, and it slams her back with a burst of light that leaves her blind. 

She goes flying into the brush from the force of the spell, and lands on something  that bursts against her, wet and—oh god, the stench— she rolls onto her hands and knees and heaves, choking on watery bile even after she's emptied her stomach completely.

She crawls away, keeping her eyes closed so she won’t have to see once the effects of the barrier’s defenses wear off, won’t have to recognize what she landed on, and as she crawls, her fingers blindly find more of the same—all cold and spongy and swollen. Feet, hands, a face that’s half bone—

She falls into the still waters of the frozen stream, and lies in its stagnant water, coated with algal slime and rotting viscera. She struggles to her hands and knees, slipping on the pebbled bed.

“No, no, no,” she groans, body surging forward as her stomach revolts again. She stands upright with help of her sword, and she stumbles forward in the center of the stream, her path marked by a swirling mass of disturbed scum on the water. She does not look, but she knows what’s there in the woods.

She comes across the barrier’s edge again, and presses her hands up against it. “Let me in,” she whispers, the water sliding into her mouth, bitter and rancid. “Let me in, let me in, let me in—”

She summons ray of frost, slamming it up against the barrier in rapid succession, breath wild in terror. It flashes red, then falls—the next barrier needs wind to break. She doesn't know any spells for wind magic but she has something, she digs through her rucksack, she has it, she knows she does—it’s in a fan, it’s—she tugs out a small folded fan, and whispers the incantation on it and flicks her wrist. A maelstrom bursts from it, and it takes down the trees in the area and the barrier turns orange, then shatters.

“What’s next, what’s next, oh god, Merle, what was next, I can’t remember,” she cries, banging her fists against the wall of light. Her muscles seize as electricity courses through her; she falls back, heart thumping erratically as her hands smoke and tingle and she can’t remember—she can’t remember. She cups her face in her hands, trying to remember what was next.

But all she can think of is the slimy grit of landing in a bloated corpse, the dead trees, the dead animals—she knows what she’s going to find, and she only hopes it’s not that bad, she hopes it’s just the effects of the wall, and that inside will be better.

She staggers to her feet, and in her frustration, swings her sword at it over and over, and then the barrier shatters with a bright yellow flash.

“That was it? Really?” she wonders, voice high and hysterical. “Shit—shit—okay!”

The next one is difficult—Merle always had Taako do this one, but she’d picked it up from him, and passwall is useful anyway, thank god for all those years to branch out her spells in—and the wall goes green and she’s broken through another layer.

The next one is a bit more difficult, but she manages with prestidigitation and some well placed logs, and within five minutes, the blue layer shatters away.

A force seizes her and she’s frozen in place. She breathes in deep against it, and for a good thirty seconds, she’s locked in place, sweat trickling down her spine. The indigo layer shatters, and all that’s left is violet—all she has to do now is cast dispel magic and she’s in.

It shatters, filling the air with a sound like falling glass, and she’s hit with a new wave of horror as she sees the town in front of her.

Bodies litter the streets in various states of mummification. The air is stale with the scent of dust and death. She walks forward, her heart in her mouth as she starts to understand.

She remembers Lup's voice, clear as crystal and gentle.

 _Lucretia, that’s… Let me show you something_.

“No—no, no,” she whispers. “Oh, no, no—”

An empty general store with its windows broken in. Bodies just slumped. Stale air, a layer of dust over everything, even the buildings.

_If that barrier cuts off everything from the outside…_

She starts to jog through the village—she pulls detect magic into her hand and throws it up like a ball, casting it over the whole town, and it screams back at her: It’s in the center of the town, and she runs, she sprints, flinging herself over the bodies, cutting through dead, dried bushes and flowers.

She prays, _please let there be someone left to save here._

She sees it, grasped in small hands. Her staff, long and age-whitened oak.

She thought she’d been so careful, so clever when she’d made it. She told it, told it while she was molding the light into the grain of simple oak she’d carved with tools she’d borrowed from Magnus, to protect its users and their loved ones from all outside harm.

From all outside harm.

But the very air you breathe can be dangerous, storms can wash away houses, destroy entire towns; winters and illness and drought and famine can kill just as well as a war can. So can the forest, so can time—her staff had cut them off entirely, left a whole town to rot in a barrier without air or water or time.

She sinks to her knees before the body that holds the Bulwark Staff in their dry fingers.

_A world cut off like that… I’m sorry, Lucretia, but it… it won’t survive._

“Goddamn you, Lup!” she sobs, staring into the sunken eye sockets of a boy no older than eight. He probably only wanted to protect his family from invading soldiers, from the terror of a world-wide war. He just wanted to keep them safe. “Fuck you and your shitty plan— _fuck_!”

She reaches out and gently pulls the staff from the dead child’s hands, wincing as his fingers crack and break their hold, crumbling to his lap.

**_Hey, lady, you have people you—_ **

“Shut up before I snap you in half,” she cries, cradling the staff to her breast. She holds her body up with it, but her hands slide down its grain and she lets herself crumble, lying at the feet of a boy she killed, holding the weapon to herself like a child.

One down, six to go.


	4. Log #C99.y3.d95

**_Log #C99.y3.d95_ **

_(See attached copy of flier.)_

_While I have yet to stumble upon any primary sources, my research indicates that not only does the place called Wonderland exist in earnest, but that people truly have gained their ‘heart’s desire’ within its walls. Just as many, maybe even more, report tales of horror and torture and endless mazes. Of strong warriors and undefeatable opponents. Both are so numerous, so in alignment, that while troubling, the lack of primary reports is only a minor inconvenience._

_I am going. The bell is there, it must be. When I asked, many of the reports colluded tales of even seemingly nonexistent items being granted as prizes. One written account (also attached) claims to have heard of prizes so powerful that the items themselves were the things of legends._

_It’s the Animus Bell. I’ve found it—Barry hid it all that time ago, certainly, but it has now entered mortal hands. We had never been sure before, since no reports of it had surfaced during the Relic Wars. Perhaps this place is where it had always resided, its users careful._

_I have been **so** unsuccessful with the others since retrieving the staff, months and months of fruitless searching, whether it’s by the relics’ own doing, their magic hiding them so deeply they can’t be tracked, or by the inhabitants of this plane’s, swapping them between themselves in tides of blood and bone and sorrow so quickly. So much time wasted to dead ends and petty civil squabbles. How can I not follow the one solid lead that I have? _

_I’m sure I will be successful, for I **must** be. _

_With at least two relics, perhaps I can more easily find the others, see the patterns that emerge. They will call to each other, the same way they call to their users._

_I will go, despite the fact that this is certainly some trap—it’s just too good to be true._

_I have left Davenport in the care of Boyland and his family, as I have often done when I am unsure when I will return. He is an immeasurable ally, his family so large and widespread that the news they bring him acts like an information net. And he is kind—people love him, and his adventurous spirit has taken him along with my journey and gotten me out of so many tight spaces._

_I never thought I would have allies in this world, or friends, or that a chance encounter would end up so invaluable._

_In addition, I have hired a guide, who not only has his own advertisement for this place, but has also traversed the Felicity Wilds on his own before. I have transmuted enough gold to not only pay him, but to ensure he doesn’t ask about what I seek in Wonderland._

_His name is Cam, and he’s a little rough, but he is kind, and I hope all goes well._

_I am confident that whatever happens, I can handle it. It will **not** be like last time, I am sure I have prepared adequately; I will not be taken off-guard by the horrors of the relics again._


	5. Wit and Wager

Wonderland is not simply a trap. It is a death trap, a pretty carnivorous flower, luring its flies to its sticky maw.

Lucretia thought she knew what she was getting into. All those stories; all that research; all the preparations… It was for nothing. Nothing at all; she could have never prepared herself for Wonderland, not even if she had trained longer, found more people to interview, heard more stories.

She has too much to lose, not enough to give up, not enough skill, not enough stamina—not enough, not enough, not enough. She is just simply not enough.

Even after all that time, she is still not enough.

The luck she had in getting through that gray, desolate cycle is gone, siphoned away two rounds ago. Her victories have been stolen from her, sapping her future and her past.

Now she knows why she failed the battles she lost, knows now why the vote was so monumentally against her—her greatest lost battle. Now, she fears the battles she has yet to face. What will lost battles look like now? Now that the world rests in her hands?

She burns with resentment, with stubbornness, and sets her teeth against the fear and the bitterness and the helplessness.She spins the wheel, arms aching with the effort it takes.

She feels like absolute shit; she’s bruised and battered and her chest aches. Her head throbs where it’s split open, spilling blood down her face. Her mouth tastes like blood from where she’d spat out teeth after getting cuffed by a mannequin with a mace. The vision in one eye is constantly blurry, probably damaged by the same battle she’d lost some of her teeth in.

But she's still alive and that means she has to keep going.

The wheel spins, gaining momentum, faster than she should have been able to make it go. And then, it slows, ticking as it rounds and rounds until it halts.

_“Mind, my dear! Now let’s see... oh, you **know** some things—quite a lot it seems. Eight languages! Magic! And, oh.  Oh,  that’s **good** , that’s just too wonderful! For your next sacrifice... you will forget the memory of what keeps you going, that last promise that you made.”_

Lucretia’s chest heaves, mouth dry and sticky, body uncharacteristically heavy. Ice creeps its way into the spaces in her veins. Her heart pounds in her ears.

The last promise she made… who was it to? What keeps her going?

Was it to gather the relics and undo the damage they’d done to this world?  If they made her forget that, what even would happen to her here? It would eliminate the need for the Animus Bell and condemn her to a life of wandering the chambers of Wonderland until she died.

No, no. She's made promises after that. _It’ll be over soon, I promise._ To Magnus, oh, Magnus. If they took that, how long would she be stuck in this hell without them? How much longer would it take? _Years_? No.

No. More recent. She's made promises after that.

Oh god, _Davenport_.

When she dropped him off with Boyland’s family—he’d been upset that she was leaving and…

She said she’d be back soon.

“Oh _fuck_ ,” she whispers to herself, stomach lurching in her horror.

She will not be Lup, she will not disappear from the people that depend on her only leaving an empty promise in her wake. It's unfair to think of it in those terms, she knows, but sometimes, it's all she has. All she has is to hold onto that seed of resentment, to hold onto the love and the betrayal and the sting of an unfulfilled promise, just to keep her going. 

 “I’ll take the penalty,” she shouts, defiant. She spits on the floor.

_“Well **someone** obviously cherishes their memories!” _

The laughter is brittle with anger, and Lucretia wonders just for a second if that’s the sound of her own death peal.

_“Memory, intelligence, they’re so **tied** , don’t you think? No need to answer, we already know! So your penalty, dear, **dear** , Lucretia, is this.” _

The wheel disappears; in its place, a simple table with two chairs materializes. A mannequin sits, head propped in its hand, in front of a highly polished chess set.

_“Let’s play a game of wits. Sit right down; we’ll even let you go first!”_

Originally, she was never a fighter, just a planner. She’s branched out, can hold her own in fights she would have never dreamed of. She can kill and maim and disarm. She can plan and she can talk her way out of situations when she has to.

But this, this is something she can do. This was what she was _born_ to do. She hadn’t played with Merle for a century for nothing—and if Merle could stalemate the existential dread horror that was chasing them, could change the rules of the game in the middle of it all, then playing him is enough training for _thi_ s. They have  _nothing_ on her friends.

Blood tickles her cheek; her ribs ache. She feels faint. She grits her teeth and steps forwards.

She sits and studies the board. “And the catch?”

 _“Well, let’s see,”_ the male voice says. _“Oh! My! You’ve lived **quite** a long time, certainly longer than a human very well should! Aren’t you just a plethora of surprises, Lucretia!”_

 _“Oh now, you’ve gone and revealed this young lady’s age, how dreadfully rude. I’m sorry, my dear,”_ the woman says. 

_“But such a long life! So much time to learn and grow cunning! I think… how about this! You play, and if you win, you move forward with no penalties at all; if you lose… how about we take twenty years off of that long, long life of yours?”_

“And if I refuse?”  she asks, to buy time to think. 

_“Well, **someone** has to give eventually.”            _

Cam touches her shoulder, glancing at the table.

“It’s gotta be rigged,” he mutters to her. She’s inclined to agree. She stares at the board, brows furrowed. 

_“Take your time, dear. But trust us, after all that time you’ve had, twenty years is no time at all!”_

_“Now, now, don’t pressure her,”_ the woman says, sounding gleeful as Lucretia puts her aching head into her hands to try and keep their voices from her ears, weighing her options.

Twenty years is a lot; previously, it would be nothing at all, but now that time is moving again for her, it's an awful lot.

But the next time they spin, it could be forty, fifty. Each round they survive, the stakes keep getting higher and higher. But _twenty years!_ But it could be something even worse the next penalty she takes, if she ignores it. If she gets the bell, if she gets the bell, though, it’s two of the seven and she’d be so much closer. If she gets the bell, it would be worth it… And it’s just a gamble, it’s only a gamble—she’s sure she has a chance of winning.

She's taken so long already…

“Trap or not,” she says to Cam, “I’m doing it.”

“Be careful,” he says. “I don’t put it past them to cheat.”

The two voices chuckle in the darkness, obviously enjoying her frustration.

She settles a bit more comfortably in front of the board, “Well, all right then,” she sighs.

She sets her jaw and begins to play. Time stops meaning anything, all she focuses on is the board and the moves and the formations.

Somewhere, somewhere in that, her mind begins to wander: she begins to reminisce. About her friends, about the spells, about the time they killed playing games, when they found the Light early, when they had to give up on it, when they couldn’t leave the ship because the material plane they’d landed in was too hostile. She thinks of how much she misses them, the ache almost like a new physical wound on her body, white hot and aching. She thinks about her failures like her life was like a game, sometimes—if she had moved here, then, then this, then that.

What sort of move is Wonderland, she wonders? Her gambit? Or someone else’s?

That thought shakes her out of her reverie, her face hot with shame as she realizes she’s been moving thoughtlessly, adrift in her thoughts.  

She looks at the board, a sinking feeling in her stomach.

She’s… she’s losing.

How is she losing? She was so sure she was winning. So sure! The board had seemed prime for her to move forwards to checkmate. Her eyes burn with fatigue.

She’s losing.

She covers her face in her hands, shoulders shaking.

“ _Check_ ,” the two voices say in unison. The mannequin taps its fingers on the table, and then gestures at her with a wooden palm.

Lucretia presses her fingers to her temples. There are no counter moves—only moves that delay the inevitable.  She scans the board desperately, looking for some way to escape, to win. She could pull back her king, and then she could… or…

She starts to realize just what she’s done. What she’s given away.

She’s going to die here, she realizes suddenly. She is going to die. These voices, these game-makers—they are not going to let her out. She is trapped here, because she was defiant, because she walked into their trap thinking she was better than them, because she was after something that was  _their’s_. She will not be leaving Wonderland. She will not find the bell. 

And no one will know. No one will know about the Hunger or the truth about the relics—no, they’ll just continue on scrabbling over them and killing each other until the Hunger finally comes. And what of her team, her family? What will become of her friends, out and alone and so blissfully unaware—she will die knowing they don’t know her.

Davenport will be okay with Boyland, but she hates the idea of breaking her promise, hates it, hates it that if she doesn’t pull out of this, she’s just another disappearance after a thoughtless promise, despite knowing that he does not remember Lup— and _oh,_ Fisher. What will happen to Fisher without her?  The paintings and sketches she’d left out for them—those only last so long, and she’s not sure what happens when Fisher goes without being given toys or food, they’ve never tried it, never even _thought_ about wondering. And Barry, what about  _Barry_? 

One hand falls to her mouth, where it shakes uncontrollably.  She pulls at her hair, teeth sinking into her lip. She could interpose a piece but, it would just get captured and she’d be back in check.

How could she have lost? How could this have happened? There’s no way it _should_ have happened, but it _is_. Why did she drift out of concentration? She never does that, she never gets lost like that—she’s always been so proud of her focus…

She rakes her fingers through her hair again, nails rough against her scalp. Blood dries sticky and tacky against her forehead, and a buzzing fills her ears as she starts to panic.

There’s no way out. She’s mated, and the game is over.

“No, no, no,” she whispers.

Twenty years, _twenty years_. It’s not even guaranteed she’d be alive for twenty more years, what if she was supposed to die in twenty one?

She’d been a terrible fool.

Of course the game was rigged against her. How stupid to go in thinking she could win. She was a fool and she took a fool’s gamble. In the worst sort of ways, she was just like the rest of her friends. Foolhardy, reckless, thoughtless, overconfident, wrathful. _Prideful_.

She reaches out and moves her king back.

The mannequin rechecks her. “ _Check_.”

She moves again.

“ _Check_.”

Again.

“ _Check_.”

There’s no way out. There are more pieces surrounding her now. She can’t move anywhere that would save her.

She moves her king anyway. She closes her eyes tightly.

“ ** _Checkmate_**.”

It’s not painful, losing. It’s just a bit like exhaling a sigh; between the spaces between breaths, between heart beats, it happens.

She opens her eyes slowly, body shaking. Her hands ache subtly, an old familiar friend of pain; her knuckles stand out a bit more prominently than before, something she’s always loathed anyway; her wrists are thinner, and when she raises her bony fingers to her face, she can feel where wrinkles have settled into her skin. She cups her head in both palms, trying to internally check her conditions.

She aches a bit more than before, but her heart is steady and she doesn’t feel unusually weak. It’s just like before, really.

But, _god._

Twenty years older. Twenty years, just taken. It’s already been three since they’d first arrived on this planet, and she knows with shocking clarity that she’s no closer to the bell than she was when she started looking for it. Twenty years lost from a quest that she has no idea how long it will take, and she’s running out of time.

Her hands shake. She swallows hard and steels them. She stands and walks towards the door, where their three lights glow in the gloom.

“Let’s go,” she says to Cam, into the forsake room.

And on. And on. And on.

She won’t die. She won’t die. She won’t die. She refuses. She’s going to smoke them out. She’s going to outlast this game. Fuck it, if they won’t let her out— she’s going to figure it out herself, she’s going to keep pounding their game until they grow bored, she’s going to give them hell. She would rather die of exhaustion from her overwhelming stubbornness than to die because those two twisted fucks in here killed her. 

So she keeps going. 

Even as she looks the electric, poisonous, venomous ooze drake in the eye as it rears back, she thinks, _I won’t die I won’t die I won’t won’t won’t._

It gouges her across her chest and belly, acid and talons cutting across her flesh easily. Electricity courses through her as she flies back and crashes against the wall, locking her limbs as she falls.

It bears down on her and she repeats _I won’t die I won’t die I refuse_ like a prayer. Acid drips onto her and sears into her, peppering her skin with holes. It treads on her, crushing her ankle with its weight, and it snarls, mouth full of gleaming needle sharp teeth and green acid.

She looks it in the face.

_I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die!!_

She raises her hands and presses them against the burning snout of the drake, summoning the highest destruction spell she can even remember.

“Fuck you—I refuse to die here!”

It explodes in her face, hit with her spell and Cam’s at the exact same time, acidic gore splattering across her already damaged body. 

She pants, her body heaving with pain and shock as the ceiling resolves into focus and the lights come back up, a nauseating kaleidoscope of colors.

“ _Wow, for a second, I didn’t think you two were going to make it out of that one! Well done!”_

“ _You two don’t look like you’re doing so well,_ ” the woman tuts.

Lucretia claws at the floor, gasping in agony. Tears pour from her eyes, smoke still rising from her body.

“Get up, Lucretia,” Cam says. “You have to _get up_.”

She can’t. The noise that she’s making doesn’t even sound human. It’s a quiet keening of pain as she lies there, staring up at the smoking ceiling. Her stomach and chest burn where she’d been gouged. Her heart thuds in her aching chest; her leg throbs in time.

“ _I know what **you** need, a bonus round!” _

Lucretia groans, closing her eyes. She can feel the skin around her wounds melting with the acid from the drake’s claws, shuddering in pain.

Cam reaches down and grabs her arms, hauling her up. She pants, gripping his arms so tight that she hears him grunt in pain as her nails bite into the cuts that litter his forearms.

“Come on, we gotta move on,” he mutters. “If you just sit there, you’re gonna— we gotta get you moving through this.”

“I know,” she gasps, clutching at her stomach, “I know, just—just let me, just a second.”

“We gotta hurry through it, you’re… it’s bad.”

She lets go, swaying in place as she pushes her weight against her injured leg. She can feel her bones shift and grind against each other, black eating at her vision as pain washes over her. She bites her cheek so hard blood fills her mouth, but she limps forward anyway.

The room darkens and seems to spin around them as they slip through the door to the next area. The room is empty save for three pedestals, each exactly alike, and each with identical doors behind them. The placards on each pedestal read something different. Lucretia’s eye is immediately drawn to the one that says ‘ _escape’_.

There’s a way out.

There is a way out. There’s a way to escape this freakish death trap that won’t mean her death. But the bell… The bell! But there’s no other way… 

“ _For this bonus round, you can choose one of the following games! Healing, Escape, or Recovery! Each has their own perks!”_

“What… what even— _Escape_? Why would that—why would you even _offer_ that?” Cam stammers, eyeing the platform suspiciously.

“ _Oh, **that** one. Well. Some people just aren’t cut out for Wonderland, and we—ever gracious us!—understand that. We’ll make a trade, just like you’d be making trades in the other games! If one of you stays behind, stays behind permanently, with no way to leave, then we’ll let one of you leave! Of course, it’s up to you who does what! We would never decide your fate like_ _**that**._ ”

For a brief second, Lucretia considers it.

She’s not going to make it out of here any other way. She’s going to die, giving it all away until there’s nothing left, in this godforsaken hell-pit, getting jeered and laughed at as she gets massacred by whatever ludicrous venomous, electric, multiplying bunny rabbit of doom scenario rolls up onto her plate.

But then she looks at Cam and the way his eyebrows scrunch up when he looks at the three pedestals, and she knows she can’t. She can’t just leave. She’s already dropped her friends off in this world with little recourse, all for the sake of her greater good—she can’t leave Cam here, too. She knows she has to keep going. 

“This is a trap,” Cam urges her, stepping towards her. “There’s no way. We should try the healing game, that’s at least… a little innocuous.”

“Obviously,” Lucretia murmurs. She holds a hand to her chest, breathing heavily. “It doesn’t sound like we both can heal at the same time, though—I’m… I’m sorry. This was more than I… I wasn’t ready for this place—I’m not—”

Cam shakes his head. He steps closer, grabbing her shoulders.

“You won’t be able to survive the Wilds on your own,” he says. “Ten minutes, and you’ll be dead—all, you’re covered in blood, it’ll—all sorts of things will come for you. It’s not, it’s not practical, you’ll die.”

She bites the edge of her cheek. “No,” she agrees, brows furrowing. He’s not making sense—Cam’s not making sense. She doesn’t understand, but then she does.

They meet each other’s eyes, and there’s a silent moment where they both realize what has to happen. What he’s telling her _has_ to happen. Cam gives her a very minute shake of his head and leans in close.

“Make it look like it counts,” he whispers, his voice barely a breath. “If they—if they think you betrayed me, it’s—they’re more likely to—to let you go. There’s no way they’ll let you heal all of that, and once you’re out—you can… Make it count; get out of here for real.”

“ _Ahem_.”

“There’s no way in hell,” Cam says loudly, pushing Lucretia away from him, towards the podiums. “We should heal! This is stupid, Lucretia, just think it through!”

“I’m _so_ sorry,” she says, then aims a spell at Cam the same time he aims for her. Strength wells up in her muscles as his magic sinks into her. She ducks, rolls, and lunges towards the _Escape_ platform.

A hole opens up in front of her, blinding and brilliant and outside. She can smell grass and dew; it’s early morning. Behind her, Cam screams something unintelligible, but Lucretia gets the gist—she doesn’t know what they did to him, but it sounds terrible, it sounds awful, and she has to force herself not to look back.

“ _Oh dear, what bad luck for you, Cam! It seems Lucretia’s made up her mind! Don’t hold it against her too much, she is dying after all! Not that you can hold too much of anything anymore!”_

And she runs.

She runs and she doesn’t look back. 

She pauses only when she becomes too dizzy to move any longer, but even then, she stops only long enough to cast the bare minimum of healing spells before she starts off again.

Slowly, her energy lags; her sprint becomes a run becomes a jog becomes a walk. She keeps moving even as night falls and a bone deep chill settles into her. She fights off a wolf, deep puncture wounds adding to her ever elongating list of wounds. She finds the energy to run again, leaving the spell charred corpse behind. 

Eventually, she staggers, hands raw from clawing at tree trunks to stand upright.

She keeps a steady hiss of spells under her breath—spells of misdirection, protection, guidance. For a brief second, she wishes she’d brought along her staff, but then shakes the idea away—it would have been a disaster in Wonderland, two relics at once?  No, her well-worn wand would have to do. So far, smaller animals have left her alone, and she’s not fallen off a cliff yet, and she’s not passed out from shock. She will soon, though.

She's down to her last spell slot too, and she's saving it, but her injuries aren't getting better, but she has to save it in case something attacks her again.

She feels her sides start to burn as the last bits of her last healing spell fade away, skin splitting open like rotten fruit. Her breathing starts to falter as her stomach flips. Her broken ankle won’t support her anymore, the splinting spell for that faltering as her foot catches on a root, and she falls to her hands and knees in the underbrush.

Blackberry thorns and leaves and twigs catch at her hair and clothes. Blood starts to itch along her forehead, slowly seeping from the wound. Soon, she’d start drawing insects. Then predators.

She grits her teeth against the pain, dragging herself through the leaves. “Gotta…keep… moving,” she hisses to herself, wincing as she puts friction on her broken ankle and open wounds. She’s pretty sure the ribs she’d broken, and then mended, have re-fractured because of her piss-poor spell work.

“No,” she hisses, digging her nails into the earth. “ _No_.”

She’s died before; she knows what it feels like. She knows she’s dying now, but it matters more than any time before. There is no next cycle, there is no ship, and there are no friends with healing abilities. No more bond engine pulling them back together. There is just this shortened, shitty, half-life she’s dedicated to making up for the promises she’d broken and the people she’d hurt.

She thinks of her friends, of what Cam did for her, and hauls herself up out of the detritus on the forest floor.

She shivers with cold, clammy sweat pouring down the back of her neck as she fights back each dry heave every  time she puts weight on her foot. Her stomach burns and screams with pain, each breath feels wetter and wetter, and her fingers are starting to turn blue.

She barely notices when the trees begin to thin, focused only on the ground in front of her and putting one foot in front of the other.

She falls again, and this time, she can’t pick herself up.

She props herself onto her forearms and looks up. She’s in a clearing at the foot of a cliff, blue sky overhead. It’s comforting to look up at, watching the clouds slip by and the periphery of leaves rustle in the wind. She tears her eyes away when black spots start to eat at her vision. She surveys the rest of the clearing.

If she had the ability, she would gasp. A building—a house. A house that’s built into the rockface, whitewashed stone and weathered wood and a… metal door.

She squints, then swallows, willing herself to move forward. She scoots herself up onto her hands and knees, vomiting blood and bile up onto the mossy border between the forest’s leaves and the cliff’s rocks.

She crawls to the door, pushing up against it. She hits her fist against it, shaking as pain ricochets out from her bruised knuckles to the rest of her already battered body.

As she slams her bloody hands against the cold surface, she notices a strange panel. She recognizes it, but it’s so jarringly out of place that it takes her a second to realize it’s a crude hand scanner.

She pushes a slick hand against it, and mutters a spell under her breath. The implosion she causes burns her palm; she doesn’t look at the white-charred flesh, she just waits until the malfunctioned scanner causes the door to slide open. She falls inside onto incongruous marble floors, flickering lights glowing white against its polished surface.

There’s a door to her right, a few feet down the long hallway. She drags herself towards that. Behind her, the malfunctioning door opens and closes itself with a repetitive loud banging, the smell of smoke grows so powerful that Lucretia retches again, blood spattering the white and black flooring.

She drags herself on, right leg numb and useless as she pulls herself towards the floor. Behind her, the door gives a high mechanical grinding noise, and something finally explodes.

If she lives, she’ll offer to fix it, probably.

 _Please be open_ , she begs the universe, _please have something_.

She pulls herself towards the door; something in the universe must be humoring her, because the door is open, and leads into what actually resembles… the lab on the Starblaster, she realizes with a strange feeling of déjà vu. Nothing on this world should look like this, except for…

She doesn't follow the train of thought; it's too good to be true.

Maybe she’s on the floor in Wonderland still, hallucinating from poisonous, venomous, electric ooze drake wounds.

She hauls herself up by grabbing a stool, which topples under her weight. She lies there, laughing at the ceiling. She reaches up with her hand and swipes in the air, trying to grab onto anything. 

She hooks her fingers into the handles that line the desk, hauling herself upright. She gasps as the room lurches around her, shaking hands grasping at a tray with petri dishes and other metallic instruments. She slips, and her weight falls onto her right leg. She falls forward, elbows coming down hard on the bench; her voice comes out so rough that her throat burns, mouth metallic with the taste of blood.

She claws at the marble on the desk, spittle flying from her lips as she pants, body shaking with cold. She’s going into shock, she has to—she has to—

“St-stay right there—”

Lucretia looks over to the door, where a teenager in a white coat stands, brandishing a pair of large, silver shears like a sword at her.

“Lucas, _move_.”

A woman shoves him from the doorway, angling her body in front of the young man. She manages a ferocious figure, despite the fact that her hands are  wrapped tightly around a comically large, cherry red wrench.

“Don’t move,” the woman hisses. “Or I'll knock your head off.”

Lucretia laughs.


	6. Something Like Luck

“Don’t move—or I’ll, I’ll knock your head off.” 

The woman is tall, dressed in a similar white coat over her clothes, all stained with soot and grease; the wrench she holds shakes ever-so-slightly in her hands.

After everything she’s been through, it’s the least threatening thing Lucretia’s ever seen.

Lucretia laughs; she slides down onto the floor, mouth filling with blood and spittle. She leans over and spits onto the floor, a gag tearing at her entire body as she moves. She retches once, twice, and then a third time, unconsciousness clawing at her entire being.

_Breathe_ , she tells herself. _Breathe. Do not die._ She tries to will herself out of systemic shock. So far, it’s not working so great.

“ _Mom,”_ the teen whispers urgently.

“I know,” says the woman. She brandishes her wrench and takes a tentative step in. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“Dying,” Lucretia says simply.

“Obviously,” the other woman answers. She inches closer, trying to sidestep the smears of blood and pink frothy vomit. She slowly kneels down next to Lucretia, one hand still gripped around the wrench, the other pressing surprisingly firm fingers to Lucretia’s neck.

“Pan in a chicken basket,” she murmurs. “Lucas, go to the storeroom. Bring me… everything. The whole medcart.”

“Mom,” the young man, Lucas, complains. “She broke into the lab! We should be—summoning the militia or—or-or _something_.”

“Yeah, no,” the woman says, lips pursed. “You know we can’t do that, Lucas.”

“Then we could let her die—I mean, what if she’s a spy? Or someone sent in to steal our research, or come after us again—”

Lucretia laughs and lolls her head back against the wall.

They said this was a lab—the realization tickles in the back of her mind. Labs, hand-scanners, all this technology that reminds her of home: She has a rough idea of where—no, with _who_ she's ended up with and it's laughable.

She doesn't believe in providence anymore—or at least, none that takes active interest in her plights, no, that was never her to begin with—but to end up here, now, stumbling and halfway dead, it's a crude imitation of what people would call fate, isn't it?

She feels spittle and blood start to bubble up in her mouth with each passing breath. She turns a wild eye to the woman next to her, her fingers now digging against the damp fabric of her blouse to pull it off of her wounds. Lucretia barely even feels it. Everything is numb and cold—her poor battered body had finally just had enough.

“ _Lucas_!”

“What?”

“How many times do we have to have the ethics conversation?! Ethics! _Eth_ - _ics_!”

“Mom, you went grave robbing last week,” Lucas says carefully.

“Do as I say, kid, not as I do.”

“That’s terrible parenting,” Lucas complains. But he turns and jogs out of sight, leaving Lucretia and the woman behind.

“Never said I was a _good_ one,” the woman mutters. She turns her stern gaze back to Lucretia. “Pardon me,” she says simply, before tearing the already shredded cotton off of her torso. “What the ever loving _fuck_ —”

Lucretia lets her eyes fall closed, breathing shallow.

“What—what happened to you?”

“Electric, poisonous, venomous ooze drake,” she gasps.

“Those… those don’t exist.”

“Tell that to the electric, poisonous, venomous ooze drake,” Lucretia laughs—or at least tries to. It comes out a horrible gurgle of sound and spit and blood.

“ _Shit_ ,” the woman swears; she looks down at the woman in front of her, mind reeling. “Okay since I’m going to have to get all up in your business, my name is Maureen. Nice to meet you, there will be no second date.”

The woman doesn’t reply; Maureen thinks she’s finally passed out.

She’s littered with a peppering of burns, shiny pale-pink welts against dark skin. Some of them are cratered like acid had been thrown on her—ooze drake indeed. Bruises litter her torso and neck, like she’d been beaten and strangled; her foot is laying oddly, pants matted with foliage and a perfect circle of blood. Maureen thinks that underneath the woman’s boots, she’ll find a fracture somewhere, judging by the drag marks down the hallway. Her hands are raw and bloody, nails all gone; one hand is charred black-white over the palm.

She reluctantly pulls her eyes back up to the woman’s chest, breathing going funny as she looks at the claw marks gouged into her skin. They’re huge and ragged and filled with dirt and blood and gravel from where the woman had apparently crawled across the forest floor. She swallows back a gag, seeing white and shiny pink peeking through the layers of dirt. She thinks it’s a miracle the woman’s wounds aren’t a few inches lower. Just a few inches down, and the story on their laboratory floor would be different: breathless, without pulse, and a lesson on the anatomy of the digestive system itself. 

“Oh god,” Lucas breathes. “How is she not… you know— _dead_?”

Maureen holds out a hand, Lucas promptly drops a rag and a bottle of alcohol into it. “Probably magic.  Let’s… get to work, I guess.”

Maureen has never thought of herself as much of a healer—she’d studied the basics and some of the more advanced theories, but her specialties lie mostly in fixing household wounds.

Although, she thinks wryly as she starts the process of debridement on the gouge marks across the woman’s chest and stomach, household wounds typically don’t include knowledge of how to remove shrapnel. Or chemical burns.

Between her non-conventional training, and Lucas’ interest in medicine, they get along just fine, working in tandem to pull their trespasser from the brink.

Five healing potions, ten salves, all but one of her healing spells, and probably one hundred stitches later, Maureen thinks that—while rough and messy—the most pressing dangers of the drake wounds have been taken care of. The woman isn't in danger of exsanguination or evisceration any longer, at least. 

“Lucas, give me the shears from earlier,” she says, wiping her bloody hands on a towel. She dips them into a bowl of alcohol and grits her teeth as some of the smaller cuts on her hands smart. She shakes them out and takes the shears from her son’s hands.

She looks up at him, at his white face, furrowed brows, as grit teeth and feels a bit guilty. Despite his bravado, she knows he’s scared and rattled. He hadn’t been the same since they had to pack up and flee Neverwinter. 

They’re both jumpy, scared, and alone—but Lucas never had quite recovered from the shock of losing his home and his father. She knows how much the intrusion must be unsettling him. And it isn’t like she's unaffected by it either, but she has the advantage of having something to keep her together: Lucas. 

“Lucas, sweetheart, you can leave. Thank you,” she murmurs.

“A…are you sure? I’m better at healing than you are, and— Mom,” he says suddenly. “What if… whatever got her is coming? What if someone’s after her, and they find us?” 

“Honey, I think it would have already gotten us,” Maureen says softly. “I don’t think anyone is chasing after her, they could have finished her off real easy. But. I do want you to go fix the door.”

“All… alright,” he agrees, rubbing the back of his neck. “Let me know… if you need me.”

Maureen starts cutting the leg off of the woman’s pants. The bite is easy enough to treat—she rubs salve into the puncture wounds and binds it. Whatever did it didn’t hit any vital veins or make it long enough to actually rip anything out.

As she binds it, she starts to consider the problem that is the fracture she knows is hiding underneath the woman’s boots. She gently runs her hand down the woman’s leg, fingers firm but careful from the knee down, feeling through the leather.

The woman stirs, knee bending in reflex. Maureen skims her fingers down the calf and then presses to the ankle and the woman screams, eyes flying open and fingers forming an instinctual spell casting position.

“Easy, easy,” Maureen says, glad she fed the woman a sedative of her own concoction in one of the healing potions—otherwise she’d probably be dead. “I’m going to have to cut off your boot to treat this.”

The woman pants, eyes still wild and nostrils flared. Her pupils are dilated so wide that her entire eye is black, lips pulled back in a feral grimace.

“Easy,” Maureen says again, reaching to put her palms over the woman’s bandaged hands.

She presses against her hands, the tension in her wiry muscles more than Maureen can push down. “Easy,” Maureen repeats. “I’m trying to help.”

“Where are my friends?”

“You came alone.”

“My friends,” the woman insists, her eyes open wide and mouth wide, her breath shallow and uneven. She twists in place, lips curled back and voice hoarse. “Where?  Where are they? Where are you? Where did you go, you promised, _you promised me—where did you go?_ ”

She’s delirious with shock, Maureen realizes, speaking nonsense and flailing. Her eyes are glazed and wild and she grabs Maureen so hard it hurts.

Her mouth moves, lips forming words that spill out into indistinct noise, a gibberish that is some strange mix of Common and something Maureen has never encountered before. The woman is screaming—it’s plain that she is—Maureen watches her mouth open and her face screw up, sees the tautness in her throat—but she’s… not screaming.

Instead of any sort of vocalization, the woman makes a sound that makes Maureen’s teeth feel fuzzy, a static nonsense that her mind slides over like wet ice.

Maureen stretches out with her free hand and slaps her across the face.

The woman jolts and pants, tension seeping from her body. She falls limp against the floor, eyes fluttering shut as she gasps for breath.

“I am going to set your ankle. I need you to keep still,” Maureen instructs.

The woman laughs, hands clutching her bandaged stomach.

Maureen clips away the boot, carefully peeling it back. The woman groans, her fingers digging against the floor.

Maureen tries to work as quickly as she can, but the damage is too much to do anything but her most thorough. By the time it’s bound and set, the woman is panting with pain, tears pouring down her face.

Maureen presses the back her hand against her forehead, grimacing as she feels the fever building up in the woman’s skin, and pulls Sleep up once more.

The woman falls limp again.

Carefully, Maureen scoops her up; she’s petite, wiry and compact, and Maureen is startled just how fine-boned she is. It’s like carrying a bird. She shifts her arms, letting the woman’s head loll against the crook of her neck.  She’s heavy, but a lot lighter than Maureen had anticipated.

“Lucas! Lucas come and help me!” She calls, gingerly carrying the woman out into the hallway. “We’re going to put her in the guest room for now.”

Lucas scowls, soot smeared across his cheek and up his arms. “The door is shot, completely,” he says irritably. “Whatever she did, our security system is _not_ gonna keep her in. Or much of anything _out_ , I can’t fix it tonight, I’m gonna have to— _Ugh_. It’s just trashed, Mom.”

“I’m sure we’ll be able to fix it, sweetheart,” Maureen says as Lucas slips ahead of her in the hallway. “We’ll just—lock our shit up magically, I guess.”

She thinks she distinctly hears Lucas grumble about spell slots and, well, as someone who just blew all of her own, she can’t say she blames him, but it’s the easiest solution.

“And I’ll sit with her,” Maureen murmurs thoughtfully. “The best way to subdue someone is to be there before they get started.”

“Mom! What if she—what if she, I don’t know,  _kills_ you?”

“I’ll be fine,” Maureen says. “She won’t be strong enough to do it for some time. I’ll keep dosing her with our magic suppressant so she won’t blow anything—or any _one_ —up.”

Lucas scowls at her, all dark brows and dark eyes and pursed lips and she laughs, “Face is gonna freeze like that, Luke.”

“ _Mom_ ,” he complains. “I’m not four anymore. I know that’s not true.” 

He huffs, and pushes his palm against a panel inset into the wall next to the door of the guestroom. The mechanism clicks and he pushes the guest room open for his mother. “Listen, I’m gonna round up the dangerous research and lock it up.”

“Good plan,” Maureen huffs, trying to deposit the woman onto the bed as gently as possible. She tries to arrange her without jostling, but there’s only so much she can do. Thank god for spells and potions, otherwise the woman would probably be screaming again. “Make sure to stuff the gemstones out of sight too. Oh, and I guess lock up the automaton room? Shit.”

“Everything’s gotta go, got it.”

Maureen reaches out and ruffles Lucas’ hair. She grabs a chair and swings it to the bedside, settling down with a sigh. “I’ll be right here. Bring me something to do on your next pass through, yeah?”

“Have fun,” Lucas mutters, brushing his fingers against her shoulder as he leaves.

“Oh, go through her equipment,” Maureen calls. “Separate it out and I’ll go over it in a bit. Just in case.”

Lucas nods, gripping the door tightly as his jaw works wordlessly. “Just in case,” he repeats. “Yeah. Okay.”

The door swings shut and locks, leaving Maureen alone with the half-dead woman from the woods.

Once she’s sure Lucas isn’t coming back, she slumps in the chair, running her hand through her hair with a shaking sigh. She takes her glasses off and very carefully sets them aside before pressing her face into her trembling hands, smelling alcohol and the faint tang of blood.

She’d held it back, because Lucas had been scared, but god—the second those alarms had gone off, she thought it was the end all over again.

Adrenaline had dumped through her system, leaving her weak and dizzy in a matter of milliseconds. She _hated_ the sounds of the alarm system, it always dropped her stomach right onto the floor, it always took her right back to the lab in Neverwinter. It was the incursion all over again, the message spell in her ear from her husbands’ captain and Lucian’s last letter in her hands, and she hadn’t had the time, it was just seconds too late—if she had more time, she could have done something else, anything else, maybe she could have fought, even, but…

All she’d been able to grab was a few folders worth of research and Lucas. She’d been able to save Lucas, which was the most important thing. She still has nightmares of not being able to, of seeing him laid out on that marble floor, bleeding and lifeless because she failed him.

The sound was that day all over again, shattering glass and spells everywhere and—she’s never figured out where or _why_ it went wrong. Every time she tries to think about it, she spins in circles, mind hazy and unable to recall _why_ Lucian had died, where he’d been stationed, or why it was worth killing over. She’s never been able to pinpoint it, but it’s the nature of trauma, she supposes. A lot of things about those last few months in Neverwinter were lost to her. 

She just remembers that he had died, he had been killed in duty, and he’d been the last thing keeping the generals and governors and regents out of her research, keeping her and Lucas safe from the whole civil war—who had started it, even? She can’t remember, no one can, just that it started, and she wanted the Millers to have no part in it, but everyone thought their research could win them the war. She remembers the message, Bane’s voice in her ear, gruff and urgent: _they are coming for you._  

And then they came. Just like that—doors blown off their hinges, soldiers filing in and Lucas pressed against her side as her fingers fumbled and her mouth stumbled against the familiar incantations.

And then their front door had exploded and someone was in their haven, where Maureen thought they were _safe_ from such things. Lucas had gone running out of their workroom without her— his hands finding the nearest thing he could reach in his panic—and she’d panicked just as much. What sort of damage could she really have done, could _either_ of them have done, to a real threat?

Lucas could have gotten hurt. Her hands shake harder and her breath is uneven now. She forces her eyes shut, inhaling to a count of five. She holds her breath, and then exhales through her mouth. Repeats until she steadies.

They’re both safe, for the moment. Their front door is shot, true, but they’re still safe. No one can find them here, not unless they’re extremely lucky, like this woman was.

She reaches out for her glasses, slipping them up her nose as she looks down at the woman. She’s small, her face pinched tight with pain and spotted with sweat and flecks of blood. She has a shock of white hair—some of it is matted to her head with blood and ointment, some of it coils in tight spirals, and some frizzes out like dandelion fluff.

Maureen can’t determine an exact age, but if she had to guess, she’d say their mystery intruder was about her age—mid-forties, maybe.

She can’t begin to image how someone that injured had managed to drag themselves this far, had even gotten lucky enough to stumble into their home. Lucas wouldn’t call it luck, she knows, he’d call it something else—a scheme, a plot. She still likes to believe in luck, sometimes. She likes to believe that there’s something out there, something good, that they can brush into on occasion.

Lately, that’s all that keeps her going: the hope that she can do something good, somehow, that she could be that something, somewhere, that brushes against someone and does them good. That and Lucas. 

But seriously, how the fresh hell did this woman manage to blow their front door up?

Lucas circles back around an hour or so later, during which Maureen had grown bored of just watching their—Guest? Captive? Invalid?—lay unconscious, and had taken apart the desk lamp and started tinkering with the parts inside.

“What is _that_?” Lucas asks her skeptically, peering down at the scattered parts and pieces under his glasses, arms full of papers and a canvas bag.

“Something just to annoy you,” Maureen answers, watching her little toy flip itself, walk, then flip itself again. “Payback.”

“I have _never_ made anything that ungodly annoying,” he complains.

Maureen looks up at him from the floor, eyebrow raised. “Yeah, _okay_ there, sir.”

“I haven’t,” he insists. “Anyway, here’s the research you’ve been working on.”

She takes the thick folio of paper, cracking it open in her lap to check its contents. Lucas had thought to include a small abacus and the pouch with her hand mirror with the piles of notes and her quills.  “Thank you, Luke,” she says.

“Our mystery burglar has a Stone of Farspeech and the components for a teleportation spell, as well as a tracking one,” he continues, handing the bag to Maureen. “I locked up the weapons—a silver dagger, a quiver of arrows that she doesn’t have the bow for, and a wand—but that seems to be all she had.”

Maureen looks through the bag, and then nods. “Renew and strengthen the message interceptor, and oh, I guess put the holy symbol back up, just in case?”

“Already done,” Lucas says, looking at the woman in the bed. “Do you think she’s gonna make it?”

“Yeah,” Maureen sighs. “I’m pretty sure she will—we do good work, kiddo.”

She snaps her fingers and the little robot flips itself into the air and spins in place as it hovers.

“Really, Mom?”

“Take it, it’s like a Stone,” Maureen says, waving her hand at the thing.

“We use Message and Sending, though?”

“This is more fun. It also won't get caught in the interception spell,” she says, tapping her temple and pointing out at Lucas. “Uses less copper, too. Snap to make it hover or walk. It hops when it has a message.”

“It was, was that what it was doing—oh okay,” Lucas mumbles, scooping it out of the air. “The button? Yeah, all right—”

Maureen sits back on her palms, a smirk curling up her lips as Lucas presses the small button on the little robot. She winks as the message plays back.

“ _We’ll be okay, don’t worry. Love you, kiddo.”_

Lucas rolls his eyes but grins at her, shaking his head as he slips out of the hallway.

* * *

Guard duty, for the most part, is terribly boring.

Their intruder mostly stays unconscious—not that Maureen expected much else. She runs a steady fever, and when she wakes, it’s brief and combative with disorientation and pain-fueled delirium. She gets a good hit in once, leaving a bruise and four shallow cuts on Maureen’s face while Maureen attempted to change her bandages and wash her, and after that, Maureen keeps her unconscious with Sleep and various potions until Maureen is certain the woman is lucid again.

Lucas continues his steady stream of nervous disapproval, chattering incessantly about plans to drop the woman at the nearest cleric as soon as the action wouldn’t kill her—Maureen doesn’t exactly _approve_ of his dispassionate reaction, but she gets where he’s coming from. She’s starting to grow tired of playing nurse—she’s made at least three more little robots in her fidgeting: one runs around on the floor, singing in discordant notes to tell the hour. Another cleans up candle wax and makes it into new ones, since she gutted all the lamps and Lucas won’t bring her more. The third reminds her to take her tea-sachet out of her mug; this one came after an hour of staring into her hand mirror to find that not only had her tea gone cold, but had also turned unspeakably bitter in the time it had seeped.

Lucas shakes his head with each new pile of components he brings her for these little trinkets. They both know the robots are all laughably useless outside of their home, especially since Maureen couldn’t very well show her face to market them. But it’s something to do, and he seems to enjoy them just as much as she does, because he makes them too.

He brings her a new quill spelled so she doesn’t have to keep re-inking it, a small disk that keeps her tea warm without having to use magic (“ _I know it’s a cantrip, but it’s still nice to not have to cast it?_ ”), and a healing potion for their… guest.

As the days slip by, she and Lucas grow more confident in the realization that this woman was alone—no one is coming for them. There seems to be a silent agreement between them that between the two of them, if it came down to it, they could subdue her.

Maureen eases off of the sedative in the potions and lets the woman come back to consciousness on her own. It’ll be a while until she’s up and able—there’s no amount of blood-building tinctures and potions that will get the woman up and moving after losing so much blood she went into shock. Dandelion tea only does _so_ much.

So all that’s left to do is wait—wait and see how the woman heals, how she treats them, wait and see what she has to say about her injuries (ooze drakes, Maureen thinks, are not both venomous _and_ electric), and why she was in their portion of east-Istus-nowhere.

She puts down her calculations and sighs, taking a long sip of her tea. She fishes her small purse with the mirror out from under the woman’s bed, and stands up off of the floor, twisting the kinks out of her spine.

Maureen sits back own in the small chair that’s become her place of residence during the day, fidgeting with the mirror. She rubs her sleeve against the emerald, polishing the emerald carefully. She puts it flat onto her lap and focuses. Light flickers across its surface, and images start to flutter past. Somewhere, snow. Then fire, pages of a novel, and a delicate flower arrangement. A flash of red and navy insignias. Something bright and silver. A pallet of paint, twined fingers, rainbow auroras against dark water.

“What is that?”

Maureen starts and fumbles with the mirror. She looks over at their patient, whose eyes look strangely clear for the first time. “What?”

“That,” the woman says. “What you're looking at. What is it.”

Her voice is soft and hoarse from disuse, but her words are even—her cadence is a bit odd, stilted, like she knows the answer before Maureen has even spoken. 

Maureen tips it towards the woman. “Just a magic mirror,” she lies. “It’s enchanted to play visions—a kid’s toy, really.”

The woman blinks and focuses on the mirror, her light brows knitting tightly. Her eyes track back and forth slightly. Her lips fall apart with a quiet inhale.

“You’re looking past the planes,” the woman says, looking up to meet Maureen’s eyes. “That's—that's the plane of thought.”

She shakes her head slowly, head falling back onto her pillows; “I’m not sure how you found something with the correct refractive index, but that’s what it is.”

“ _Wait_ , how did you—” Maureen stops, seeing the woman’s eyes have drifted closed. “Who even _are_ you?”

“Lucretia,” she murmurs softly. “It’s… just… that.”  

“But how did you know?”

But it’s too late, the woman—Lucretia—is unconscious again. Maureen snaps the mirror closed and tucks it into her pocket, striding out of the room. She races down the halls of their laboratory, bursting into Lucas’ workroom.

He yelps in surprise, sending a teetering pile of parts crashing to the ground, gears and glass spheres filled with nebulous magics crashing to the floor. “Mom! What the hell!”

“Lucas! She’s staying, we’re having her stay,” she declares, grabbing her son’s shoulders. “That woman—she has to stay when she wakes up, she _has_ to!”

Lucas looks up at her, eyes wide, “What?! Mom, mom, no she’s— she’s like? A burglar? She broke all our shit!”

“Lucas, she knows,” Maureen says urgently, “We need to start looking up refractive indexes on gemstones. We can start with emeralds, since we know that works. And colors, if the refraction is important—oh god, there’s _so much_! I’m going—I have to—the materials I need are… ah… naturally? Is that the key, all along? Artificially… if… we… hmm…”

“Mom, have you… are you okay?”

Lucas’ quiet voice shakes Maureen from her daze. She beams and squeezes Lucas’ shoulders. “More than okay, Lucas, this woman—she knew about the mirror, without prompting! She must be… she has to know about the planar system, too! I thought we were the only ones now!”

“All the more reason to knock her out and dump her in the city, mom! Mom, _think_ about what you’re saying!” Lucas pleads.

Maureen shakes her head, “Lucas, don’t you get it—I thought, I thought that everyone who knew, everyone who’d seen our research, I thought they were _gone_. I thought my project was dead, and this woman, this wild woman who showed up half dead, she—she knew! And she knew how it worked without even using it, and we’ve never, Lucian and I could never figure it out, it took so long to get it to even work, and, and this is a chance to have a real breakthrough, the first in years!”

Lucas shakes his head, grabbing his mother’s arms, “Mom, you don’t, we don’t even know her name, much less—”

“She says her name is Lucretia,” Maureen says. “And Luke, Luke, honey, if she’s dangerous, if she _is_ , if she’s truly dangerous, I swear to you, I will make sure nothing ever happens to either of us, however I have to. But this—this has to be some sort—”

“If you say fate like some sort of hokey drama, Mom, I’m going to seriously vomit.”

“No,” Maureen says, shaking her head. “But don’t you think I would be an idiot to not take advantage of this?”

“…Mom, just don’t,” Lucas says after a long moment, “Don’t get hurt. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Maureen leans forward and kisses him on the forehead. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” she whispers, “Would not even dream of it.”

* * *

“I want to have my things,” Lucretia says, after the third consecutive day of lucidity.

Maureen looks up from the desk in the room, glasses slipping down her nose. “Pardon?”

“My pack,” Lucretia enunciates. “I want it.”

Maureen pushes her glasses up, then sighs. “You didn’t have anything on you,” she lies.

Lucretia tips her head, lips pinched. They stare at each other for a long moment—Maureen does not look away, does not change her expression.

Lucretia sighs and slumps back into the pillows, face a mask of pain at the movement. Her bandaged hands clasp over her breast.

Maureen turns back to her spread of equations, quill scratching as she clicks beads across the abacus.

“I know that isn’t true,” Lucretia whispers after a few minutes of silence. But she says nothing else for the rest of the day.

The next few days pass in similar fashion:

Maureen comes into the room in the morning, and begins her work. She helps Lucretia eat her food, now sedative-free despite not being suppressant-free, changes her bandages, and helps her clean up. She holds the woman up as she makes her walk around the small room, accruing a mass of yellow-brown bruises on her arms from the force of the woman’s grip as she struggles with the pain of it.

Maureen’s impression of the woman is this: obstinate, aloof, and cold. Any ideas of partnership she had evaporated the second she realized that Lucretia is not interested in her, or her mirror. She’s tried to draw conversation to it, by using it and asking her questions about how she knows about it, by explaining that she’s interested in the mirror and how it works, and so forth, but Lucretia simply gives her the same flat-eyed stare every time.

Maureen recognizes it as the look of someone who has mastered the art of quiet contempt—she’s seen the look on Lucas’ face enough to know it. It sort of makes her want to shake the woman, just to see what would happen.

Lucretia does not speak often, and when she does, it’s the same argument. She wants her things. She wants her pack.  

“Don’t tell me it’s missing,” Lucretia snaps on the fourth day; “I know I had it.”

“Listen,” Maureen sighs, pinching her nose. “You can’t have it. Sorry. I will not give it to you, period. If there’s something in there that you want that isn’t your Stone of Farspeech or your teleportation components…”

Lucretia covers her face with her hands, shoulders crumpling in. It’s the first show of something resembling an emotion other than expressions of pain that Maureen’s seen from her since she was bleeding out on their laboratory floor.

“I’m sorry,” Maureen says as Lucretia’s shoulders start to shake. Guilt makes her soft, makes her let her guard down. She stands and reaches out to gently touch the woman’s shoulder. “You can’t contact anyone outside of this place, and I can’t… I can’t, in good faith, chance you leaving before you’re healed—”

Lucretia moves so fast that Maureen barely has time to react—Lucretia snatches her hand off of her shoulder and yanks her close. The move seems to cost her dearly, because her breath is labored and her pupils blow wide, sweat beading on her temples as she fists her free hand into Maureen’s blouse.

“How would you like it,” Lucretia hisses, her fingers tightening on Maureen’s wrist. “If _you_ were kept somewhere, helpless, and away from your family, knowing they missed you and mourned you?”

Maureen falters, mouth falling open as she looks into Lucretia’s face. It’s awash with rage and sorrow, her eyes damp despite the strength in the way she sets her jaw.

“I’m sorry,” Maureen says, stunned. “But you—you can’t.”

“You won’t _let_ me, there’s a difference.”

Maureen looks at the door, then back at Lucretia, at the way her chest heaves with exertion and the sweat on her face, the shake in her hand, despite its firm grip on her wrist. The hand on her blouse has slackened, her palm pressed flat against her diaphragm, fingers curled against her sternum as they twitch in pain.

“Your injuries have a ballpark range of eight weeks for semi-full recovery,” Maureen says. “You will not leave this place until then, at the _least_.”

“I _am_ a prisoner, then.”

“You aren’t!”

“Then let me speak to my family! Let me leave this room! Stop—stop feeding me whatever it is you are—I can’t even—I can’t even cast Light. A cantrip! A fucking cantrip!” Lucretia snarls, her nails biting into Maureen’s wrist. “Do you think I can get up and kill you? Do you think I’m a danger to you? Your son? If you keep this up, I will be. Whatever you’re afraid of, I can do worse than that if you do not let me contact my family.”

Maureen swallows hard, staring her down. She places her hand on Lucretia’s shaking knuckles. “If you harm me, I don’t give a shit,” she says. She plucks Lucretia’s hand off of her wrist, twisting it with a deft movement. “But if you touch Lucas, I will end you.”

Lucretia, to her credit, does not make a sound of pain, even though Maureen continues to twist, holding her hand in the air.

“You hear me? If you _ever_ threaten my son, I will kill you, I will make whatever fucking ooze drake hellhole that spit you out into my home look like paradise.”

She pauses, then repeats: “You hear me?”

“Yes,” Lucretia whispers.

Maureen drops her hand, and Lucretia lets it fall to the bed, staring resolutely ahead. Her breath is shallow and Maureen sees a patch of red blooming on her bandaged chest. She stands, feet braced apart as she stares down at Lucretia. She watches as tears trace slowly down the woman’s cheeks, her lips shaking as she struggles not to make a noise, struggles not to cry.

The silence of their standoff drags on, sharp and uncomfortable, Lucretia’s hands limp and turned palm-up on the sheets as her eyes fall shut against her tears.

Maureen takes the gesture as acquiescence; she sits on the edge of the bed and begins to unwrap Lucretia’s bandages. Some of the sutures across her chest have popped, and Maureen sighs with frustration.

They are silent as Maureen opens up a vial of potion and dabs it across the heated skin. Lucretia keeps her chin tucked up and her jaw tight, fingers curling into the sheets as Maureen runs two fingers across the wound, murmuring a spell under her breath to seal the edges back up.

She grabs a roll of cotton and starts to bandage her back up in stony silence.

“He doesn’t understand why I’m gone, why I left,” Lucretia says after what feels like an eternity. Her voice shakes with desperation. “He _can’t;_ I left him in someone’s care, so he’s safe, but he didn’t understand why I was leaving, and I’m all—I’m the only family he has left. Please. _Please_.”

Maureen finishes tucking the bandages together before acknowledging the request. She peers up at Lucretia from the rims of her glasses, lips pursed.

“We’ll see,” she says.

And because she’s a mother, she means ‘ _no_ ’.

She stands and grabs her mirror from the table, tucking it into the pocket of her skirt. She walks to the door,  pushing her palm flat against the scanner. It chirps at her and the door unlocks and Lucretia cries out.

“My journal, then—that—that at least? My journal, and something to write with?”

“Maybe,” Maureen says, slipping out of the room.

And because she’s a mother, she means ‘ _yes’_.


	7. Log #C99.y3.d???

_Wonderland was… a catastrophic failure, beyond all… beyond…_

_I nearly died. I nearly died, and took everything with me, and I—I cannot…_

_The absolute devastation, the absolute shame, behind this revelation is so…_

_I was reckless, and I paid dearly for it._

_I found…help… in the form of a home, built into a cliff-face of…somewhere. I do not know, nor do I think I am **allowed** to know. I suspect them to be the infamous Millers; I did not venture planetside with Lup and Barry to investigate the Millers when we first arrived, but the woman, Maureen, has a hand mirror that she uses to look into the plane of thought. _

_She fidgets and fusses and fixes things, her hands always moving to do something. Small automatons litter the room I am… staying?… in. I do not know what to think about her, or her son, whom I have only had a brief impression of. But Maureen Miller flits about like a bird, always moving, always doing._

_At times, she is kind. At present, she has shown herself capable of incredible warmth and kindness, but there is something there that tempers it. Perhaps she is just wary, perhaps she is simply sensible._

_She isn’t deliberately cruel, and I think that is a distinct subtly that I, myself, know well. I know what I did is no different from what she did to me, only I wrapped my imprisonment sentences in pretty new lives and empty promises. I know that I should not be here, I should be elsewhere, doing other things than being stripped of my powers and freedoms. So, who between us, is the most cruel?_

_But I must leave here, but I am unable for now. I cannot contact Boyland to speak with Davenport, nor can I cast any sort of magic. Maureen promises that in time, I can and will, and that she will help me get to town and on my way once she has deemed me well._

_My journey is finished. For now, certainly, but maybe…_

_Maybe forever. It shakes me to my very core to consider that my plan has hit a stall so quickly, so disastrously._

_At least one relic is forever out of my grasp—I cannot go back to Wonderland, the mere thought of it fills me with terror like I have never known in my years. At night, I hear the voices, and the wounds that it has inflicted upon me will be forever on me. It is strange to think that I will bear these scars forever now, when my body has been littered with wounds that will never mark me for a century. But for all my scars and my fears and aging and dreams, it will not bring the bell to me._

_Oh, my friends, what should I do? I have failed you._

_I have failed us all._


	8. Détente

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanna take a second to thank y'all for all the nice comments and feedback about this! It means a lot!  
> Come yell at me about taz on tumblr under the same screen-name!

Maureen feels bad. Actually, no, she feels shitty; there’s a difference, and right now she feels like she’s a monumentally shitty person.

The reason for this is simple: she’s keeping a woman hostage in her guestroom, threatened to kill her, and is holding a conversation with herself on whether or not she really should be a good person and do what she knows she needs to do—let Lucretia out of the guest room, let her use her Stone, and stop feeding her the magic suppressant.  

But she has to have a decent enough argument to win Lucas over. She can’t do this without Lucas.

She doesn’t hide anything from Lucas—there’s no reason to, really, and being honest with him is the best way to keep him honest with her. But she knows he wouldn’t approve of what she’s about to do, what she’s about to ask for, and for good reason, really. She has to work through it before she presents it to Lucas. That’s just the way it is.

Maureen isn’t entirely sure that it’s not some trick, not some ploy to play to her weaknesses, but Maureen cannot stop thinking about Lucretia’s plea. Of her begging; of her fighting tooth and nail, snarling; of her desperation.

Lucretia is a human being, and they are treating her like she’s a criminal. For what reason?

 _She broke into the lab_ , Lucas would say. And that’s true, but she was dying and desperate, and their lab was probably the first glimmer of hope that Lucretia had seen in the woods. It’s the only one, Maureen knows—their home was the _only_ place that Lucretia could have stumbled to, save for the village on the outskirts of the forest, but it was miles and miles and miles away, a two-day journey without magic, at best. 

 _She could be a spy_ , Lucas has argued. Will argue. 

And that could be true as well—despite her injuries, Lucretia could be a plant. It’s not like their enemies are above injuring people to get back at his enemies. Anyone who would actively threaten a fourteen-year-old boy because his parents refused to kill innocents is capable of nearly anything. 

But… she’s a person, and Maureen knows she is far too kind for her own good—her insistence on kindness and temperance all but obliterated her family. It killed Lucian and put Lucas in extraordinary danger, and chased them from their livelihoods and their home.

But the way Lucretia had cried, had slumped in defeat. Their mystery woman has a _family_.

And if it were her… Maureen can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to be in Lucretia’s situation, held somewhere she didn’t know, recovering from near-death, knowing that Lucas _knew_ she was gone, but couldn’t contact her, had no way of knowing if she was even alive or remotely okay.

She would lose her mind with worry. It would drive her wild; she would tear down everything in her path, she knows she would. She has to take the threats in context of a woman in pain, who knows she’s being subdued, who doesn’t know why, who has someone she loves out there, someone who’s waiting for her.

Maureen has never thought she’s a cold person, but what she’s done is cruel, plain and simple. She’s holding a woman hostage in her home; Lucas might be all right with it, but Lucian… her father… even _she’s_ horrified at what she’s doing.

She paces in her workroom, arms crossed tight over her chest.

It’s endless. Every argument she has, she knows that Lucas can counter it, because she can too. She just has to hope…

She runs her fingers through her hair, absently braiding it back from her face. She wants to sit at her bench and churn out equations, go sit in the garden by Lucian’s cairn. Wants to sit with her mirror. Wants to do something, something good, _anything_. Anything to rid herself of the sinking feeling of guilt in her gut.

There’s no helping it, she’s just going to have to lay it all out, prepared or not. Even if Lucas doesn’t agree, she can still… well, she can pull the entire security system down and rewrite the whole spell program, but it’s not worth it and she’s not entirely sure it won’t kill them. It’s better if she does it with Lucas, it’s always better when they do things as a team. The Millers always do their best work as a family, as part of a group. 

She stands and smoothes down her skirt and sighs. She slips from her room, down the hall towards Lucas’ workroom, where the light still gleams under the door. She knocks before placing her hand on the scanner, just because Lucas fussed at her a few weeks previously about breezing in and out. He is a teenage boy, but she wishes it had more to do with _that_ than the lack of cleaning his room.

“You’re up late,” she says, stepping over a pile of books.

Lucas raises his hand from his bench, something white and glowing in the other. “Is it?”

She dodges around a stack of papers piled precariously on the edges of his tables, and wrinkles her nose at the unwashed pile of agar plates and dishes, grouped together. “Luke,” she sighs, “Really?”

He sighs and chains a spell that glows green into the other one, and together they pulse a strange purple. He cradles the orb in his palms and turns, tossing it to her.

She catches it, holding it up to inspect it. “Weather spell? Is there a Divination spell in that chain?”

“To add to the garden minders.”

“Hmm… Go for it, kiddo, doesn’t change that you need to clean in here,” she says, tossing the spell back.

“Mom,” Lucas complains. He runs a hand through his hair absently, pushing his bangs from his face. She feels her lips curve into a fond smile—he resembles Lucian so much sometimes. “I cleaned, like… last…”

“Month,” she supplies. “When I made you.”

“Would you believe me if I said it was an experiment?” he tries.

“On my patience? Or are you attempting to grant sentience to that mold pile over there?”

Lucas brightens, his eyes going wide behind his glasses. “Do you think I _could_?”

“No sir,” Maureen says sternly.

He scowls, wrinkling his nose up, already returning to fidgeting with his weather spell. “Well, we’ll see.”

“Lucas Miller, I swear to gods,” Maureen starts, reaching out to scrub her fingers through Lucas’ hair. “If you do not clean this room up, I will be stewing beets for dinner for the next month.”

“Ew, Mom! Those are gross,” he laughs, pushing at her hand. “No beets, please—”

“No beets, but only if you clean this stinkin’ workshop,” Maureen says, squishing his cheeks between her palms. “You got me?”

“Fine, fine!” He grabs her wrists and tugs them away, and she leans down to kiss his forehead.

“Mom,” he complains. “Really?”

“Mm, yep.”

“So what gives, Mom? I know you didn’t just wander in here in the middle of the night to tell me to clean my shit,” he says.

Maureen pauses and purses her lips. “ _Well_ ,” she says slowly. Lucas winces at the paired tone and drawn out syllable of the word.

“Lucas… you know how we have the ethics conversation, oh… once a month?”

Lucas turns in his chair, looking at Maureen over his glasses, face almost hilariously deadpan. “Oh, I know it,” he says. “What did I do _this_ time?”

Maureen sits on the work table behind her, ignoring Lucas’ spluttering. She knows she’s not sitting on anything important; it’s just more mess and scrapped equations.

“It’s not… just you,” Maureen says slowly, clasping her hands between her knees. “We’re both…”

“Oh,” Lucas says. “It’s about that woman. Lucretia, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Maureen mumbles. “Lucas, don’t you think we’re being… sort of terrible people—we’ve never tested those sedatives on anyone, and… There’s no evidence that she’s a spy or anything.”

Lucas sighs and rubs under his eyes, knocking his glasses askew. “Mom, I—I don’t know,” he says. “You… you’re supposed to be telling me.”

Maureen pauses and inhales sharply. Sometimes she forgets that Lucas is only just sixteen—he’s so brilliant, so enthusiastically well-spoken, and has taken to their lonely living situation so well. Maybe she’s not coping as well with being functionally in exile as she thought; the last adult she’d spoken to was the shopkeepers in the nearby town, and that was… six months ago.

“Lucas, I’m sorry, I know,” she whispers. “I just… I want to consider your input.”

“I… just… Mom, I’m scared,” he says plainly. He pushes his glasses off of his forehead with his palm, holding them tightly as he runs his hand through his hair. “All we have is this, and… intuition aside, there’s… People aren’t _good,_ Mom. There’s no such thing as a wholly good person. I don’t see why we should invite ourselves open to yet another person who could hurt us.”

“Lucas, that’s not true,” Maureen says softly. “There are good people out there, _we’re_ good people.”

“Mom, you just said we’re doing something ethically unsound,” he shoots back. He presses his forehead against his palm, sighing. “I mean, we could take care of this woman, and she could turn around and betray us. Or she could just leave. Either option. But we have no way of _knowing_.”

“Luke, sometimes… sometimes good people do bad things. Not because they’re bad, but because they’re people,” Maureen says slowly, folding her hands between her knees. “Sometimes it’s for their goals, sometimes it’s because they don’t know. Sometimes it’s because they love. Just because we’ve done this because we love each other, doesn’t… doesn’t give us the right to do it.”

“So what we’ve done is wrong, is what you’re saying, even though our reasoning is sound.”

“I think it is,” Maureen answers.

Lucas makes a face, and Maureen knows he’s struggling with the fact that it’s not an issue that’s black and white. He’s always had problems with gray areas, and she’s done her best, but she doesn’t know what else to do with him. Lucian was better at talking it through with him, he just was better at people than she was. She and Lucas are too quick, too easily distracted to focus on the nuances sometimes. She’s let a lot slip.

There are so many ways that she could have been a better mother to him. 

“It is,” she says more firmly. “We can keep ourselves safe without resorting to this, Lucas.”

“If you say so,” he mumbles, sounding a little disbelieving.

“I do,” she says. “I do. In the morning, we’ll pull her Stone out of the safe, and wean her off of the suppressants. I think we should also… let her move around the lab a bit. What needs to be modified, security-wise, for that to happen?”

Lucas purses his lips, “We’d need to register her to the system, and code which doors she’s allowed in and out of. Hers, of course,” he starts, easing out of his gloom as he fixes himself on the task at hand. “The inner and outer doors, the baths, kitchen, library are all safe. What about the workrooms?”

“I would say only the general workspace,” Maureen answers, “Not yours or mine. Nor our bedrooms. Not storage or the entry to the quarry, either.”

Lucas pulls a piece of scrap paper from a pile, scribbling down as Maureen talks. The hard part, convincing him, is over—the rest is easy. They bounce ideas back and forth, discuss the spells they need to lift, the ones they need to place, and what they need to move in the common areas.

Maureen goes to bed that night feeling considerably less shitty. Not great, but considerably less shitty. It’s a start, at least.

The next morning, she makes Lucas pancakes, which—okay, maybe she’s laying it on thick, but someone has to remind the kid that there’s good things out there, and food is always the first place to start. So, she makes pancakes with thick slices of ham out of their cold storage and fresh strawberries from the garden. She portions out three plates, setting some aside for their currently-captive guest.

Lucas just gives her the stink eye when he slinks into the kitchen. “Really, Mom? I’m not five, you don’t have to bribe me.”

She wrinkles her nose up at him and flicks a strawberry top at him. “Luke, honey. Eat your goddamn pancakes and don’t sulk.”

He laughs as the strawberry top gets stuck on her fingers. “Got it.”

She pushes it against his forehead as he grabs his plate and he fake-jabs her with his elbow. “C’mon, Luke, maybe I just wanted to make pancakes,” she teases, grabbing his elbow. “Maybe I made them because I wanted to eat them.”

“I know bribery when I see it,” Lucas says resolutely, grinning over at her. “And _this_ is some grade-A Mom bribery.”

“When did you get so good at perception?” Maureen complains, gently shoving him towards the table.

He settles himself down and starts eating. “I mean, c’mon, it’s not hard,” he says with a mouthful of pancake.

“Ew, Lucas, _please_ chew with your mouth _closed_ , honey?”

He rolls his eyes and waits between bites to speak. “Remember when you missed the _one_ fantasy t-ball game I played in—”

“There was an emergency at the lab, Lucas, I didn’t purposefully skip it,” Maureen protests.

“And then you made pancakes for two weeks straight until Dad made you stop,” Lucas continues over her.

“Okay, okay,” Maureen laughs, “I get it. It’s not bribery, though; it’s just… some comfort food.”

“For you or me?”

“Both of us,” Maureen answers, pouring honey over her stack. “Lucas, I know it’s been rough out here, these past few years. I know that I… some of the things you’ve had to go through, you shouldn’t have. I can’t fix it, Lucas, and I’m so sorry. Sometimes I’m really not that great of a mom; I think that’s something I'm still learning.”

She watches as honey beads down the edges of her pancakes, pooling on the bottom of the plate. “I—your father and I could have chosen differently, back then. And maybe we’d still be safe, out with Lucian’s family in Goldcliff, or in the lab in Neverwinter. But we chose because we couldn’t sacrifice our ideals, and to us, that was worth our lives. I made the call and… I chose our integrity over the lives of thousands, and I… I still think that was the choice to make. I’m still going to make that choice, Lucas. Even if it puts us in danger, I can’t…I can’t not continue to make that choice.”

“Mom,” Lucas says. “Eat your pancakes and chill. I get it.”

She turns and Lucas nods at her and shrugs.

“Like… I don’t _understand_ it,” Lucas admits, tapping his fork absently on his plate. “There’s a lot of stuff I don’t remember or I didn’t know when it was happening. But you and Dad… Mom, I trust you. You made a decision and I trust you. I love you, Mom and, you're my best mom?”

“Thank you, honey, but I'm your only mom,” she whispers, sighing softly. She picks up her plate and takes it to the table, pushing aside a pile of books and papers to make herself a spot.

“So what’s the game plan?” Lucas asks around his fork.

“Mouth. Food. Closed,” Maureen sighs, cutting her pancakes into precise little pieces with the edge of her fork. Lucas rolls his eyes at her and she wrinkles her nose up. “I was thinking that we let her have a little freer reign of the lab first, see how she acts. She’s asked for her traveler’s journal, so I thought we’d give her that.”

“How’s she even gonna get around the lab, Mom, she can barely walk when you help her,” Lucas asks, spearing a strawberry.

“We have those rolling chairs in the lab,” Maureen muses.

Lucas snorts, “Yeah, that’s _real_ safe, Mom.”

“I think it’s a good idea!”

“Okay, _sure_.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” Maureen persists. “There’s armrests and everything on it, and it’s not like she’d be scooting herself around, I’d be pushing the chair around.”

“I think this is an excuse for you to push yourself down the hallway in the rolling chair,” Lucas says into his cup of tea.

“What? _No_ , why would I do that? I mean, you’re right, I should test it.”

Lucas laughs, shaking his head, “Mom! You yelled at me when I tried that!”

“You could have gotten hurt,” Maureen says, grinning across the table at him.

“What happens when I have to set your broken arm, Mom, what happens then?”

“Well,” Maureen says slowly, “You’ll set it and then laugh at me and I’ll be very, very embarrassed, now won’t I?”

“Eat your pancakes,” Lucas laughs, shaking his head. “I’m gonna shuffle shit around, _again_ , while you take our, uh, _guest_ her breakfast. Meet at the vault in an hour or so?”

“Yeah,” Maureen agrees, swirling a strawberry in the honey on the bottom of her plate. “That sounds like a plan.”

Lucas nods and drains his cup, stacking it on his empty plate. He stands, plucks a strawberry off of Maureen’s plate, and pops it into his mouth. “Awesome, I’m gonna go push everything that’s not already in storage into the closet, then,” he says.

Maureen rolls her eyes, not even bothering to tell him to not talk and chew at the same time. Some battles can’t be won.

There’s a lot of those, these days. She sighs and eats her way through her stack of pancakes, idly pulling one of the folios of paper on the table towards her. She skims through the barely-legible scrawl of Lucas’ handwriting, only half-reading his shorthanded spell notations.

She taps her fork against her teeth in thought; it’s not too late to change her mind, she thinks. She could grab Lucas and call it all off, and they could call in a favor with Bane and have this woman carted off to cities unknown and go back to their solitary life in their little corner of the Wilds. But even that presents challenges—she’s not reached out to Lucian’s old captain since they’d fled, and he’d want to know where they were to check up on them, and really, she’s forever thankful for the help he’d provided them during the civil wars, but… She doesn’t trust him; deep in her gut, she doesn’t trust anyone still involved with the militia after the war.

And honestly? She made up her mind the very second she answered the question posed to her— _how would you feel_?

She sighs and runs a finger against the remnants of honey on the bottom of her plate, rubbing it between her thumb and forefinger. She licks it off her thumb, biting down on the skin just slightly as she runs through her options just one more time.

This is just what she has to do. She picks up her plate and sets it in the sink, rinsing off her fingers and her and Lucas’ plates with hot water. She picks up the tray with Lucretia’s portion of pancakes, the handful of vials of potions and tinctures, and her dandelion tea. She looks at the tray and chews her lip.

Pancakes are a fairly subpar peace offering, so she sets the tray back down and rubs her hands against her dress, skimming the room.

She wanted her journal. Maureen saw it, slim and blue and bound with silvery threading—it’s in the vault with her other supplies, and she can’t bring it to her just that second, but later she can. And she’d paged through it—it was empty save for a delicate hand-drawn map and a staining of blood and dirt.

She walks to the center island of their kitchen, a large slab of marble hauled from the quarry they’d built this laboratory from, and set up on a back-to-back set of shelves. She kneels and starts wiggling books out from their precarious stacked-up wedges. She’s pretty sure she’s got at least a few blank notebooks in there—she’s always bought them in stacks and they build up pretty fast because she’s more inclined to use scrap paper than bound notebooks.

She steadies a pile that starts to wobble and knocks another over, sending books spilling across the floor like dominos.

“Well, shit,” she mutters, but among the mess, she finds what she’s looking for. It’s nowhere near as pretty as the journal they’d confiscated, but it’s hard bound and the paper is good and the gold edging on the binding is nice enough that it doesn’t actually look like she’d scrounged around for it. She sets it on the tray with the pancakes and the tea and grabs one of the fountain pens Lucas leaves lying around (she prefers quills and dip pens _‘Like an old lady’_ , as Lucas points out constantly, but a fountain pen is probably best for their mostly-bed-bound guest) and sets it with the notebook.

Feeling marginally better about her offering, Maureen heats the pancakes and tea back through with a small gesture, picks up the tray, and heads towards Lucretia’s room.

She finds the woman staring up at the ceiling, face blank.

Lucretia turns her head and sits up slowly, mouth pinched tight. She eyes the tray warily as Maureen slides into the room.

“I brought breakfast and your potions for the morning,” Maureen says softly. She sets the tray on the bedside table, and then rubs her hands nervously on her skirt. She draws her stool out from its nook underneath the table and sits down slowly.

“It’s not your journal, exactly,” she says slowly, “That’s still locked up with your other things, but… I brought you a blank notebook.”

She picks it up from the tray, along with the pen and holds it out.

Lucretia looks at her, brows drawn tight. “Why?” she asks quietly. She doesn’t take either the notebook or the pen, although she reaches for them for a brief second before she lets her hand fall back to the sheets.

Maureen swallows and holds them out a bit further, resisting the urge to shake them at Lucretia. “I… you… you didn’t choose what happened to you,” she says slowly.

“Actually,” Lucretia says, her voice level and sharp. “I did, in a way. I chose the situation that resulted in this.” She gestures to her bandaged chest.

“I mean, you didn’t consciously choose to fall into our house,” Maureen retorts.

“No, I chose that, too. Had to break in. Blew up the door, remember? How’s that going, by the way?”

“ _For Istus’ knitting sake_ , I’m trying to—I’m sorry! Okay! I’m sorry, we shouldn’t have kept you like you were an animal! You were right, it’s terrible, we were treating you like a, a prisoner and it was fucking shitty! We’ve been drugging you, far past the sleeping potions that you needed to heal—and, and we shouldn’t have, _I_ shouldn’t have. I am so sorry.”

Lucretia blinks in surprise, mouth forming a small ‘o’ as her brows fly up and her jaw drops slightly. A few seconds of silence passes fairly uncomfortably before she clears her throat. “I’m… okay, yeah,” she says slowly. “Yeah, it was. But I… I get it. Thank you for this.”

She tentatively takes the notebook and pen from Maureen’s hands and lays it in her lap. “Not to sound ungrateful,” she says, “But… I really would like my own back.”

“It’s blank, though,” Maureen says. “Is it just a sentimental thing?”

“It’s not—oh. Oh, huh… It would look blank,” she says absently, tapping her fingers to the hardbound back. She chews her lip and shrugs. “It’s not blank, just… it just looks that way to you.”

“Magic?”

“Yes,” Lucretia answers slowly, sliding a fingernail along the edge of the journal. “Something like that.”

“Is… it dangerous for me and my son?” Maureen asks carefully. She scoots up closer to the bed, summoning the med kit towards her with a quick flick of her wrist.

“No, do you not use a wand?”

Maureen is startled by the sudden question, but Lucretia looks at her expectantly with the same clear-eyed gaze she wore when she inquired about the mirror days previously. 

“What? Oh, no, it’s, I _do_ ,” Maureen admits with a laugh. She holds out her hand towards Lucretia, turning wrist slightly. “The ring is an arcane focus.”

“That’s nifty, I’d been wondering,” Lucretia says, gently turning Maureen’s hand to study the ring in interest. It’s twined wood and silver, wrapping around a small chunk of a raw purple stone.

Maureen keeps her hand outstretched as Lucretia studies her ring in a silent interest. Her fingers are surprisingly cool against her palm where they’re not covered with bandages, slim and sure as they turn the ring very slowly. Maureen gets the impression by the scrutiny the piece gets, by the way that her eyes flick back and forth under light lashes, by the purse of her lips, that Lucretia knows a fair bit of magic herself, and can guess the methods of the making of her focus. She sees her thinking, even, and recognizes the look of someone projecting out the course of a project—maybe Lucretia is an artificer like Lucian was. Maybe she’s a jeweler.

She feels a bit self-conscious about the sudden attention Lucretia is giving her. The part of her that sounds a bit like Lucas wants to pull her hand away, chide herself for showing Lucretia how she casts her spells. The other part, the one that wants to make friends and delve into the mind of the woman who had so offhandedly commented on her mirror tells her to sit still and see if she can coax more of these solid glimpses of the woman’s intelligence and shrewdness from her.

“I know… _knew_ ,” Lucretia starts, and then corrects herself, shaking herself from her inspection of Maureen’s ring. She lets go of Maureen’s hand. “I knew someone who would have loved this sort of thing.”

“There you have it. Are you sure you and your journal aren’t dangerous to Lucas and I?” Maureen asks again, to distract herself from the prickling sensation on the back of her neck. She starts to set the kit up on the side of the bed.

Lucretia sits up slowly, grimacing as she shifts. “No,” she says. She puts the notebook aside and begins to unwind the bandages on her hands dutifully. “It’s only dangerous if you can read it.”

There’s another uncomfortable pause. “That… was a joke,” Lucretia says, sounding mournful. “Really, I was joking.”

“You… should work on that a little,” Maureen advises.

Lucretia huffs softly, face creasing in pain as she tries to reach for the fastening of the bandages around her torso.

“I’ve got it,” Maureen says. She reaches out and starts to unwind gauze from Lucretia’s chest and stomach.

“I’m sorry,” Lucretia says. “I’m sorry, too. I should not have threatened your son or you. I wouldn’t… even if I am a prisoner, you two haven’t… I wouldn’t hurt you.”

“About that,” Maureen says, standing briefly to untuck some of the gauze from under Lucretia’s shoulders. “Like I said—I’ve… I thought about what you said yesterday, and you’re… you’re free to wander the common areas if you’d like. Um, there’ll be some places that you _can’t_ go, and there’s security in place to keep you from them, but it’s a safety issue, really. We, Lucas and I, we build things and test spells and some of the things we work with are dangerous. But once you’ve healed completely, I… I’ll take you into town and help you get out and on your way. Your food won’t be drugged unless you ask for a sleeping potion or a tincture, and I’ll make it in front of you, if you need. But… for now, yeah, you—you’re allowed out of this room.”

“I don’t think I’m up to wandering much,” Lucretia admits, her breath shallow from the effort of staying upright as Maureen unwinds the last of the bandages. Maureen guides her slowly back against the pillows, letting the sheets pool around her hips.

“You need to continue to get up and move around,” Maureen says. “I’m going to start working on a crutch for that leg, but I don’t want you using it until this healed up a bit more,” she adds, gently tapping some of the unharmed skin above the stitched-up gashes.

“Thank you, but I don’t think I’d get far without it,” she says.

Maureen opens a glass container and pulls out a piece of alcohol soaked cloth and wipes her hands with it, then lets it drop to the floor. She pulls out another and gently runs it across Lucretia’s chest, from breast to rib, then again with the parallel gouge that runs from rib to navel, surveying the puckered pink flesh around the stitches, looking for signs of infection or further popped stitches.

“These are healing up better than I expected,” Maureen says softly. “And as for moving around, I have a rolling office chair you can use.”

Lucretia’s chest jolts with a sharp exhale, and for a second, Maureen looks up, worried she’d hurt the other woman, but it happens again, and she realizes that Lucretia’s silently laughing, her head turned aside and a scabbed-up hand going to her lips.

“…I’m serious.”

“Oh dear, I’m sorry, that’s just… I’d be scooting around with one foot and—I’m sorry,” Lucretia says, dissolving into a fit of giggles. “That doesn’t sound very safe.”

Maureen purses her lips and huffs a sigh through her nose. “It’s perfectly safe, there are armrests, and I’d be pushing you around sometimes,” she mumbles. She uncorks a potion and pours it liberally onto a clean rag from the med kit and begins to run it against the wounds on Lucretia’s torso.

“If you’re sure,” Lucretia says uncertainly. “I’m afraid even a small fall would finish me off, unless that was your plan all along?”

Maureen pauses for a second, eyes flicking up to Lucretia’s face which is still fairly neutral. “Oh _shit_ , that was a joke,” she says, laughing with delight, her face warm.

“I mean, it _would_ hurt!” Lucretia says in reply, wincing as the area of popped stitches from the day before is cleaned.

“It’ll be fine,” Maureen replies, gently probing the area. “Let me know if this doesn’t ease up on being tender by tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“How’s your ankle feeling?” Maureen asks. She grabs a tube of ointment and squeezes some out into her palm. Lucretia holds her burned hand out carefully, wincing as she glances at the scabbed-over and blistered palm.

“It… hurts,” Lucretia says carefully as Maureen gently rubs the ointment onto her hand.

“I can bring you more potions for that; I’m sorry it has to heal the usual way,” she says softly. “We were both out of spell slots, and even with a rest—it was powder in there.”

“Yes, I didn’t… I didn’t do myself many favors on that.”

“What even happened to you?”

“I told you—electric, venomous, ooze drake. It might have been poisonous too, but I didn't take a bite of it,” Lucretia answers.

“Those don’t exist,” Maureen says in exasperation. She starts to loosely wrap Lucretia’s palm back up.

“It was one,” Lucretia insists. “It wasn’t _natural_ , but it was one. It was a construct.”

“Oh,” Maureen says, suddenly chilled. “That’s… powerful magic—to do that much damage.”

“Oh, yes,” Lucretia sighs softly. “It was very powerful indeed… more so than I reckoned for.”

“…Where?”

“I don’t know,” Lucretia admits. “I don’t know where it is in relation to here, but far enough away, even though it's still in the Wilds. It’s nothing to concern yourself with. I only made it this far because my companion…”

Maureen watches as Lucretia falters and shakes her head, mouth trembling. “He cast Command and Death Ward on me—and then made me leave him. I _had_ to leave him,” she says softly, voice cracking. “He _made_ me leave him; he knew I wasn't going to. Made me keep going until I was safe.”

“ _Where_?”

Lucretia shakes her head again. “You wouldn't be able to find it unless you're invited, I think.”

“That's fucking—tell me!” Maureen shouts. “ _That's_! _Lucas_ goes out into those woods, we _live_ here! Something that powerful to nearly kill you, to cloak its position? Tell me!”

Lucretia starts, blinking quickly as she jerks her hand back to her chest. “I—”

For a second, she seems genuinely shocked at the sudden outburst, but it’s gone as quickly as it appears. She presses her lips together and folds her hands into her lap. “It’s safer,” she says slowly, “I think, if you don’t know anything about that place at all. I understand the desire to keep you and yours safe, I do, and this is… I think that it’s safest for you and your son to not know where and what beset me.”

Maureen pushes her stool away abruptly, shaking with anger. “If you expect me to hold credence to your thoughts, I expect _you_ to give _me_ something to work with! Not some half-assed bullshit about a vague powerful magic that can summon nonexistent monsters that can reduce a woman to ribbons!”

“I hold with my statement,” Lucretia says. She watches as Maureen stands, first aid kit clattering to the floor. “…well, then. Does this change the conditions of my stay here, Maureen?”

The room is quiet save for the sound of vials rolling across the floor. Maureen shakes so hard that Lucretia can see her hair trembling, but she keeps herself neutral.

“I—you—how cruel—I, no, of course not,” she spits out. “What I said still stands, even if some nameless horror drags us all down the next time we go out on a supply run.”

Maureen turns on her heel and leaves.

Lucretia sighs slowly, watching the door slide closed with its usual pneumatic hiss. She taps her finger against the black and gold notebook, picks up the fountain pen, turns the page, and begins to write.


	9. Distemper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick note on the setup of the lab-- it's a bit like [this](http://www.urbanghostsmedia.com/2017/03/subterranean-limestone-quarries/) and [this](http://www.bldgblog.com/2005/11/subterranean-bunker-cities/). 
> 
> Again, thank y'all so much, especially to everyone who's come in with comments about how this has impacted how y'all react /feel about Lucas (especially in the finale); it means SO much to hear??? because wow????

Maureen storms from the guest room to her workroom, slapping her hand up against her scanner. It chirps at her as it fails to read her signature and she’s forced to take a second to reposition her palm and breathe deep. The door slides open and she kicks her way in, knocking over piles of books and components as she grabs a stool from her bench and slings it across the room towards the crystal and mesh enclosing on the arcane cores for their security system.

She sits with a huff and presses her palm to a section of wire, and it melts beneath her touch into quicksilver droplets ; she brushes them aside and grabs the smallest of the globes of light. She unchains the glowing strands and tosses out several of them, then braids two together. She sets it back into the cage and taps it with the stone of her ring, pursing her lips.

Nothing happens.

She snorts and tries again.

Again, nothing. She presses her fingers into the second smallest and closes her eyes. A grayscale version of the borders of her spell work flashes behind her eyes and she hooks her finger into the globe, and she sees flashes up on each border. There, where a deer had wandered into the garden.  There, the waterfall’s natural gap washing away the effects of the magic she and Lucian had set into the ground ten years ago, when this place was just home to their more extraordinary and more frowned-upon experiments. There, the meandering trail where Lucretia had stumbled into their home, confirmed by the broken grass and blood she and Lucas had found.

Nothing else. Nothing else is even _near_ the borders. She feels the anger slip out of her suddenly, like dropping a dish to the floor. Shame starts to creep up into her, foolishness at the quick jump to wrath she’d taken with Lucretia. Maybe she was a little too quick to judge their guest.

But something powerful enough to conjure an imaginary beast that could hurt someone like that… in the woods she calls her home. Sure, the Wilds are… well, wild. But magical beasts, the occasional marauder or quest-seeker… all of those things are easily enough dispatched. The beasts leave well enough alone, since they can’t get into the lab and don’t really have an interest in their gardens. (Their chickens had been another matter entirely—all of those had been eaten rather swiftly the first few months. Their second batch had been moved into the mine shafts leading out to the quarry they’d built the compound into, because Maureen didn’t want to deal with the mess.) The wayward person was easily turned away with magic—between the barriers and a few good charms, all someone would see would be a rotting entrance to a mine.

But… a powerful magic-user would blow past all that—much like Lucretia herself did. She taps her fingers nervously, chewing on the inside of her cheek.

There’s nothing in the perimeter of their home. There’s nothing that seems even remotely close when she checks the long-ranged spell points she and Lucian had built in.

It seems like Lucretia was telling the truth.

And why wouldn’t she? She’s not exactly in a position where lying would do anything for her—not that being honest had really done her much good.

Maureen drags a hand through her hair, closing her eyes in frustration. She’d gotten a good peek at who Lucretia could be—a little dry, yes, but ultimately witty. Genuinely curious. She’d gotten a glimpse of something soft and molten, too, the tender look on her face when she spoke of the person who would have liked her ring, the sorrow of leaving her companion behind to whatever summoned the non-existent drake.

She’d seen the human in her; Lucretia is a _person_ , not something to rail against when it doesn’t cooperate. She just doesn't know how to deal with Lucretia’s most-likely deliberate vagueness. But then, for the last two years, her world has narrowed to just Lucas.

It’s just them, and she’s forgotten how to keep herself in check around other people. She’s always been a little impatient, a little brash, but she feels like she’s lost complete control of herself.

She sighs and pulls the main core from its chassis. She slides away from the bench and takes it to the center table. She holds her ring over it and murmurs the incantation that holds it together. It unfolds on the table like a flower, and she sighs again, picking through the individual spell parts. She reaches out and grabs a small piece of parchment and a quill. She has to rummage a bit for her ink, but finds it soon enough.

She starts notating a new set of protocol cues and restrictions. She holds her thumb over the mouth of the inkpot and picks it up, turning it over onto her finger. She rolls her thumb back and forth on the parchment, then lays it into the center of the opened spell core.

It flashes white, and then a light pink as the parchment sinks into the framework of the spell. That’s one part of it taken care of, at least. She’ll need to gather some biostatistics about Lucretia for anything else—but she can at least start on her profile.

A name, a set of restrictions, and a basic iris color to feed the system. Then, all she needs is a magical profile and an age for the system to scan, along with a more in-depth iris scan for the higher security doors to recognize.

She sighs and toys with the wedge of spell that would end up holding Lucretia’s information. How powerful of a mage is Lucretia, to escape something like that? It’s something that’s been nagging at her since Lucretia commented on her mirror.

In any case, the system scan will give her some idea, at least. It’ll have to wait, though; her little timekeeper chirrups from her pocket. She waves her hand over the core and it closes back up into a sphere of light, and she carries it back over to the security station, sliding it back into place.

She pulls a handful of silvery powder from a drawer and lets it pour over the mesh, whispering the incantation. The cage knits itself back together and each orb glows in a sequence of colors that Maureen watches carefully. They all settle back to a soft white pulse, and she nods to herself, satisfied that the new information was accepted into the system despite being incomplete.

She leaves the workroom and heads down the hallway, carefully ducking as the tiled floors give way to the original opening to the quarry. She descends into the marble hallway, the sound of her steps echoing against the ground as she winds past the blocks of abandoned marble, past the restricted lab where she runs her sensitive experiments and stores her and Lucians’ abandoned projects. Past the room where the chickens cluck at her and the underground portion of the river that they use to pull water and power from. Past the open section where the ceiling of the mine had crumbled in that she and Lucas had converted to their vegetable garden, unwilling to put their sources of food at the whims of griffons and dire-bears. The vault is deep in the mine, right at the heart of the abandoned quarry, the first thing she and Lucian had built, and the first thing that she and Lucas reinforced.   

She finds Lucas already waiting, a pile of boxes by his feet, odds and ends stuffed unceremoniously in them. She sees a robotic arm, a spill of raw garnets, several scrolls of parchment, and an assortment of other odds and ends and rare components.

“How’d your bribe go?”

“Ugh,” Maureen sighs. “Well enough at first, but…”

She pauses, chewing over her next words carefully. She doesn’t want to worry Lucas anymore than he already is—the previous night’s conversation is going to stay with her for a while.

“I want you to be careful when you go outside, Lucas,” she says slowly. “Lucretia doesn’t remember where she came from, or how far away it was from here—only that it was over twenty-four hours of distance.”

“Did you Zone of Truth it?”

“You know I don’t know that spell. And besides, I… we have to learn to trust her,” Maureen murmurs. “I mean, I’ve checked up on the wards—there’s nothing in our area except for the usual menagerie of beasts.”

Lucas chews his lip and sighs. “Not like I do much outside since we’ve moved the gardens and livestock down here.”

“Just don’t go pulling any teenaged stick it to the man rebellion until we know it’s safe,” Maureen shoots back and Lucas shrugs. She sighs again and rubs her palms together.

“You ready, Luke?” she asks, taking her place at the door beside Lucas. He looks a little apprehensive; she touches his shoulder gently. “Lucas, I’m… I know you’re worried—I’m a bit worried too, but I also think we’ll be fine. Lucretia swore up and down we weren’t in danger from her, or whatever hurt her as long as we stayed here. And what I saw in our security system backs that up. I just want you to be careful because I’m your mom.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Lucas mutters, wiping his hands on his pants. He chews his lip, staring hard at the door. “I’m good.”

“Let’s go, then,” Maureen says, lifting her hand. They press their palms to the scanners as one as they lean forward; she feels a little silly as she closes one eye and keeps the other open as a puff of air and a flash of white light blinds her as the spell scans her eye, magic, and hand at the same time.

This  sort of security for them is largely untested—they’d never had any need to _use_ this vault before now. It’s rather ingenious, actually. The first time it’s opened, either of them could do it, but afterwards, they both have to be present to unlock the doors. But the chance that the magic code in it malfunctions and locks them out of it completely, or that the security mechanism kicks in if the spell doesn’t read them correctly, which would be… bad.

But the scanners turn green after the flash, the mechanisms within them reading their magical energy signatures as well as the whorls of their fingers and the color of their eyes. It had been Lucas who had thought to make it read their arcane powers and eye color, on the off chance that someone _‘just fuckin’ cuts our hands off—it’s a bit more difficult to gouge our eyes out and shit, yanno?_ ’. It’d been a bit morbid, but at the time Lucas was recently without a father and fresh from a raid, so she’d given him a break.

She’s still inclined to give him a break, really, because there always is something in the back of her mind whispering _yeah what **if** someone cuts our hands off_?

The vault door swings open slowly and everything inside tumbles out onto the cut marble floor of the quarry.

Maureen closes her eyes, and pulls her lips into her mouth, biting down on her lips as the clattering echoes against the stone walls. Something tumbles against her feet; she can hear the sound of rolling glass, and a metal clanging as Lucas starts to swear.

She inhales slowly through her nose and counts to five before she exhales.

“Lucas Roman Miller.”

“Now—listen, I—you can’t, you can’t actually be mad at me!” Lucas yelps.

Maureen inhales again and slowly opens her eyes, arms crossing at her chest as she looks down at Lucas as he scoops up part of the mess on the floor between them. “I can’t?”

“I literally told you I was—I was just going to shove shit in there!”

Maureen reaches up and rubs her forehead. “I mean, yes. Yes you did.”

“So you can’t be mad!”

“I just—I sort of expected,” Maureen starts, then shakes her head.

“I _literally_ said!”

“I know, I know… I just… Luke, _really_?” she asks, kneeling forward to start sorting through the mess. “Some of this stuff is relatively dangerous, Lucas. I didn’t think you were literally just going to shove it in here?”

“I mean, I had other stuff to do,” Lucas grouses. He shrinks back and shrugs at the look Maureen levels at him afterwards. “I had to move laboratories! That’s not easy! Or quick! And I _told you_ ,” he whines.

Maureen holds up a hand. “Tone,” she says simply. “Lucas, yes, you told me you were… literally,” she says, enunciating each syllable carefully, “Going to shove shit into the vault. So let’s have a discussion about why you think that’s acceptable laboratory protocol. This right here, Lucas,” she continues, picking up a glass orb where a green colored smoke floats; “Could have activated itself and opened up a portal to a demiplane, which is fucking dangerous shit. You _know_ what kind of things we work with.”

“…ugh.”

“You realize that taking shortcuts at first ends up prolonging whatever it is that you have to do, right?” she points out. “We have to clean this up, and organize it now for things to fit into the vault, and how did you expect to find some of the things again?”

“I get it,” he sighs.

“Sometimes I wonder,” Maureen says. She then purses her lips and exhales slowly through them, blowing a raspberry at the end. “Oh well. Let’s get it all sorted out.”

* * *

In the end, it takes hours to tidy up after Lucas’ original attempt at storing their more precious research into the security vault. They have to haul everything out after a spell got loose and activated itself, some strange divination protocol that Lucas had been building that he swore up and down was supposed to be something for cleaning, but all it did was tug at their clothes and squirt water at their feet. It also flooded the bottom of the vault with two inch layer of soap foam and tried to transmute the mess on the floor, which was all around not pleasant.

But they manage to clean it up and get a system in place—or she does, at least. She’s tired, grumpy, and her socks are wet by the end of the ordeal, and Lucas slinks away once they finish. It’s probably the smartest thing he could do, because while she loves Lucas, sometimes she doesn’t even know how she managed to keep her temper this time around. Maybe because she knows she taught him his worst habits. Maybe because he was really stinking cute as a baby.

She wants to go to bed. But she has to check up on Lucretia, take her the journal she promised. The Stone is tucked into her pocket, but she’s going to wait on giving it to her. She’s not up to removing the wards tonight. And food; she supposes she needs to feed their guest and herself—Lucas probably won’t show up for dinner, but she might as well.

She sighs and strips her shoes and socks off, tossing them into her bedroom as the door slides open. She drops Lucretia’s Stone on her desk, and starts to shuck off her damp skirt in the dark room. She lays down face-first on her bed and sighs into her comforters, trying hard not to cry in pure frustration.

Sometimes it’s so easy to live like this. Swaths of time can pass by with nothing but smiles and laughter; they invent, they build, and they talk. She sits in the gardens and breathes in the scent of the earth, feels the thrum of the magic she and Lucian built into this place, and she is calm.

Others, she feels like she’s in a cage too small. She has no access to the tools she’s accustomed, no access to easy pleasures like butter or chicken she doesn’t have to kill and pluck herself. She misses her wide open lab in Neverwinter, with its picture windows and efficient organization systems. She misses having tutors for Lucas, having Lucian to back her up when he gets out of hand. She misses Lucian reminding her to pick up her things, to take breaks, all those little things she misses when she gets absorbed in something. She misses being able to hand off household chores, she misses being able to go to the museum or the theatre with Lucian’s arm around her waist. Misses walking into his workshop with the spill of colored stones and spoils of wire and hot glass.

She misses falling asleep with warmth and weight beside her. She misses dreaming dreams that she can forget, that don't make her wake in a cold sweat.

She misses not being afraid. She misses not being frightened of phantom dangers in her periphery; she misses not having to encrypt her notes. She misses delighting people with her inventions, with her theories. She misses _helping_. She misses being surrounded by peers. She misses when she could turn to others when her research hit a dead-end. She misses the time when Lucas getting sick, or her getting a fever, didn’t mean they’re one spell slot from death if they don’t take care of themselves.

She misses not having to cast disguise self every time they went into the village, answering to a name that’s not her own when she sells the potions and the little spelled trinkets she and Lucas make to the villagers.

She misses feeling safe.

Some days, most days, are good days.

This, for however good it started, is a _bad_ day. She lays on her bed in her underwear and blouse, feeling like her chest could just cave right in and collapse into the covers. Her mind is frightfully blank, empty of thought or fancy other than the ache of it all.

She’s alone. She’s alone in this world. It’s just her, and it’s just Lucas, who will one day grow just as tired of this as she is, and… if he chooses to leave, well, Maureen can’t stop him. She knows he _won’t_ but sometimes she’s afraid that maybe he _should_ , at least for a little while. It felt like just yesterday she was twenty and deciding that no, no thanks, druidism wasn’t for her—she loves the woods still, still loves the mysticism and all it stood for; still hears the whispers in the darkest nights when she sits in her garden under the star. After, she made her way home to her father to take back up her spell books and her beakers and equations. And that was where she belonged, and that was where she stayed.

She needed that time, and she’s afraid that Lucas, too, is going to need it. How else will he stop taking shortcuts with his magic—and cleaning and equations? How else will he learn how to clean up after himself or make his own food without burning it? How else can he make the mark he wants to leave on Faerun if he’s stuck in a safe house in the woods with his once-renown mother? He wants to learn medicine, he wants to learn more Enchantment magic—and these are things she can’t give him. But oh, he’s _safe_ here.

She curls her fingers into the covers and trembles.

And if Lucas goes, where does that leave her?

“That’s not going to be for a while, Maureen,” she whispers to herself as she shoves her face deeper into her blankets. “Get it _together_.”

She rolls slowly onto her back, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. She sighs slowly and sits up, drawing her knees to her chin.

The last time they were in town, it still seemed like politically, the continent was as unstable as ever, with Neverwinter controlled by an advisory board as neither Sterling or his son were fit for independent rule, one too old and the other far, far too young, and the rest of the continent changing hands between warlords and feudal leaders and... Well. They could go somewhere far from his rule, but… the thought of being open to ambush again… It chills her.

It’s just her and Lucas—she doesn’t have anything else left to lose if he was to come after her again. Or she could bow her head if it happened, concede and do the unbearable; make him his weapons and the gadgets he wanted, magical items of stealth and violence, page through Lucian’s notes and find information on that last assignment he was deployed on, pick through the parts and figure out what it was that was so important that Lucian was sent to his death over it.

She stares out at her wall, mind blank.

She can’t remember what it was; just that it was something vague and powerful and she and Lucian both balked at it and it had been the final straw that broke his commander’s patience with Lucian’s placatory nature.

Why had it been so important? And what war were they even fighting anyway? She can’t recall why all the cities and territories had been thrown into chaos, and it’s that that worries her the most. Was it a drive for power that did it? Was it land or money or magic?

It had been such a large war... How could she not remember?

If she can’t remember, how will she know when it’s safe to leave their haven?

Feeling hazy, Maureen stands, lips pursed in a small frown as she grabs a pair of breeches up off of the floor and slides them on. She wanders out into the hallway, brows still drawn tightly as her mind empties and stumbles around her stalled-out thoughts.

Oh, well. Dinner.

She makes her way to the kitchen, swearing at the mess of books and papers she’d left for herself that morning. She opens up the cold storage cabinet, the spell billowing out chilly air against her knees as she kneels to peer inside.

She pulls out a container of broth she’d made, and nods to herself. She busies herself with chopping onions, tossing them into her soup pan with oil.

By the time the onions are caramelized, she’s forgotten what she was even worrying about.

* * *

She takes two bowls of soup and bread to Lucretia’s room with the night’s potions and two mugs of spiced cider for after. Lucas hadn’t shown his face yet, and she isn’t in the mood to eat alone, and she needs to get to know Lucretia if she’s going to let her wander around the lab. Or maybe she wants to apologize. She doesn’t know.

She leaves the tray floating in the hallway and runs to grab the blue and silver journal from her room, tucking it into the waistband of her pants so she can scan her hand at the door.

Lucretia looks up from the black and gold notebook she’d been given that morning, raising an eyebrow. “I need more ink, please,” she says, holding up the fountain pen. “Also, let your son know that to really bluff people, it’s probably wise to not stammer.”

“What—Lucas? Lucas has been in here?” Maureen says, looking behind her shoulder on instinct. “When?”

“Just left,” Lucretia says, closing her notebook into her lap. She’s pulled up a second blanket around her shoulders like a cape, and Maureen thinks that, oh, maybe she should dress Lucretia if Lucas is going to wander in and out of _rooms he’s not supposed to be in in the first place_.

“He’s—he’s not,” Maureen stammers, face hot.

“Supposed to be in here, yes, I gathered,” Lucretia says, amusement heavy in her voice.

“What did he do?”

“Oh, nothing I’m surprised you haven’t done,” Lucretia answers, looking curiously at the floating tray. “Is that onion soup? It smells wonderful.”

“Yes—but, what,” Maureen asks, feeling a bit whiplashed.

“Just pretended to cast Zone of Truth,” she says, sitting straighter against the pillows. She grimaces a bit but the humor doesn’t leave the corners of her mouth, which are turned up in a small imitation of a smile. “He wanted me to tell him where I came from and what I’m doing here, so on. I told him that I told _you_ all I knew.”

“That little…!”

Lucretia chuckles softly, shaking her head gently. “No harm was done,” she says. She studies Maureen carefully, then grins. “Is that my journal in your pants?”

“That,” Maureen says, snickering. “Sounds like a terrible pick up line.”

“I’m not the one who put someone’s journal in their pants.”

“I don’t have pockets,” Maureen says, drawing the book from her waistband. She hands it over to Lucretia, who laughs softly as she smoothes her palm over the silver inlay, fingers trembling over the bloodstained corner of it.

Maureen pulls her stool back up to Lucretia’s bedside, letting the tray float over to rest on the bed between them.

“So here’s the thing,” Maureen says, picking up her own bowl. “We’re going to eat, and… we’re going to talk. I need a handle on you before I give you your Stone back. I verified what you said this morning, and… I’m sorry for losing my temper with you. …Again.”

Lucretia shrugs and slowly pulls the tray into her lap. “Thank you,” she says softly.

They eat in silence for a moment, and Maureen thinks on what she wants to ask about. The knowledge about the planes, the fact that she stumbled through all the wards without raising a hand until she hit the front door—the spell that obliterated the front door!—the components for seriously high level spells in her bags. The blank journal… All of it.

“So,” Maureen says awkwardly, reaching for a chunk of bread to dunk into her soup. “Tell me about yourself.”

Lucretia snorts against her spoon, sending soup splattering back into her bowl. “Oops—ah, well, that happened.”

Maureen gives a short laugh, shaking her head as Lucretia dabs at her hands with a napkin. “What was that all about?”

“Nothing, just—that, it’s such an awkward question. I haven’t been asked something like that in… wow, a long time,” Lucretia muses. Her face goes slack for a moment as she looks out at the wall; Maureen recognizes the vagueness in her eyes as contemplation, so she stays silent.

Lucretia shakes her head and tears a corner off of her own piece of toast, rolling it between her fingers. “Yeah, it’s been a long time. Uh. Well. My name is Lucretia. I’m stuck here for the time being,” she says slowly. “I’m not sure what else you’d like to know about me.”

“What were you doing out there—wherever you were?” Maureen asks between mouthfuls of soup.

Lucretia shrugs and eats her balled up bread. “I… I was doing my job, I suppose you’d call it,” she answers.

“You an adventurer by trade?”

Lucretia shrugs. “Some would say,” she says. “Certainly, I uh, _adventure_. But I’m not answering to anyone but myself. I’m looking for… well, I deal in magic items, I guess is the long and short of it.”

“An artificer?”

Lucretia winces, and then freezes. “ _No_ ,” she whispers, a little too quickly to be believed. She shakes her head and sighs slowly.

“No,” she repeats, a bit firmer. “I _look_ for things. I go from place to place, and if someone is looking for something, I go look into it for them. Sometimes I find it for them. Sometimes it’s just a myth. Sometimes I find things, and then I sell them.”

“So you just… go on quests? What’s in it for you?”

“Money, a bit,” Lucretia answers, stirring her soup slowly. “I like… helping people. Some of the things I come across are dangerous—not magical items at all, but beasts or wild magic or rogue sorcerers. This time, I just bit off a lot more than I could chew.”

“And you have a family?”

Lucretia shrugs. “Yes and no,” she says softly. Her lip trembles a bit, and she hastily takes a mouthful of soup to hide it.  “I have… I have someone I take care of. We’re not blood related, but he’s my family.”

“Where are they?”

Lucretia shakes her head. She lifts her hand and wipes her eyes with the heel of her palm.

“Somewhere safe,” she says after a moment. “Somewhere better than with me.”

“Oh,” Maureen murmurs. There’s something in the way that Lucretia says the words, in the way her voice drops and her hands shake that colors the whole room just one shade darker. It feels like her food is stuck in her throat as she swallows.

“What I do isn’t exactly _safe_ ,” Lucretia continues, shaking her head. “As you saw.”

“That’s not what you meant,” Maureen says despite herself. She taps her spoon against the rim of her soup bowl, looking at the sheets and the chipped surface of Lucretia’s bowl, the silver of the spoon against her dark fingers.

Sometimes she hears the same despondency in her own voice; she heard it in her head, just moments before. Lucas would be better off in a different place, it whispered. Lucas would have been better off with a better mother. Lucian would have lived if she’d been a better wife. She wouldn’t be here if she’d been a better person—anywhere, anyone, anything would be better than this.

“Fair enough,” Lucretia whispers.

They sit in silence for the remainder of their meal. Maureen stacks their bowls together and sets them aside. She hands Lucretia her mug of cider, warming the drink with a simple cast of Prestidigitation.

“Tomorrow,” Maureen says, touching Lucretia’s knuckles as the woman clutches the mug tightly, her eyes fixed on the wall in front of her. “You’ll be able to talk to them.”

“Thank you,” Lucretia says softly. “I… thank you.”

Maureen shakes her head. “No. It’s… you shouldn’t be grateful I’m being decent,” she says.

Lucretia shakes her head and gives her a secretive smile. “Shouldn’t I? I take what I get, Maureen. That’s all that’s kept me going,” she says. “I take my delights when they come to me, because if I don’t, they won’t be given to me later down the line.”

“Fair enough,” Maureen echoes. She sips her cider slowly, taking comfort in the heat of it against her palms. “Is there anything you want to ask me?”

“Why are you out in the middle of the woods, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Every wild wood needs an eccentric magician and her son,” Maureen answers easily. “I mean, haven’t you heard the saying?”

“I don’t think that’s a real thing,” Lucretia replies.

“It is,” Maureen says into her mug, grinning against the rim. She takes a long sip to keep herself from laughing. “It’s a thing. Ask anyone!”

“I’m not convinced,” Lucretia says.

“No, it’s a real saying. Every wild wood needs an eccentric magician and her son. Look it up when you have a chance.”

Lucretia laughs, shaking her head. “I see,” she says. “Is there anything else you’d like to know about me?”

Maureen shrugs. “I need some biostatistics to feed into the security system spells so you can wander around here without setting the alarm off every time you move, but I can get some of that tomorrow. You’re human, correct?”

“Yes,” Lucretia says, nodding.

“Wizard?”

“Yes.”

Maureen drums her fingers against her mug, wiggling her toes against the floor. “Specialty?”

“Abjuration,” Lucretia answers after a moment of thought. “Though I’ve dipped my toes into a lot of pools. A… _lot_ of pools.”

“I can start filling in on that, tomorrow I’ll take a print from your hand and I’ll need something to store in the spell, ah… well, honestly, and this is gross, I’m sorry, but I’ll need blood or something?”

“…you’re not a necromancer, are you?” Lucretia asks after a moment.

“No. Promise,” Maureen says seriously. “If you’re not comfortable with that, I can sort of jury-rig it so that the spell doesn’t work off of that, but it’s going to severely limit where you can go,” she offers.

Lucretia chews her lip in thought. “I think,” she says carefully, “I have bled enough recently.”

“Okay,” Maureen murmurs, nodding. “I can work around that. I’ll do the other readings tomorrow after you make that call. Is there anything else I can do for you tonight, other than the ink and… maybe, would you like a shawl or a nightshirt?”

Lucretia shakes her head and begins to take the potions off of the tray, lining them up one by one on the bedside table. “No, just those would be lovely.”

Maureen stands and picks up the tray with the empty bowls. “I’ll be right back,” she promises.

“And _I_ will be right here,” Lucretia says with a wry smile, uncorking the first of her potions.

Maureen slips out to the kitchen, finding Lucas chewing on an apple with his wand stuck behind his ear. He looks up at Maureen and scowls.

“I don’t trust her,” he says without preamble. “Something doesn’t seem… right about her.”

“Lucas,” Maureen sighs. “She seems to be perfectly honest—she’s a little secretive, yes, but… I don’t think it’s worth too much thought. Don’t work yourself up over it. I have it handled, and young man, what did we talk about regarding proper meals— **and** _proper wand placement_? Do you want to lose your ear, kiddo?”

“Ugh, mom! I think you’re just—I think you’re being bewitched, or beguiled—she’s obviously a high level wizard, if she broke our wards _and_ into the lab! That door _still_ isn’t right, and you’re—you’re… Mom, don’t get caught off guard just because she’s another person, we can go into town if you’re lonely,” he says, setting his apple on the counter.

Maureen feels her face flush and a black taste creeps into the back of her mouth. “Lucas, I think it would be best,” she says slowly, “If you left the worrying about this situation to me.”

“No,” Lucas starts, “I—you _wanted_ my input and now that I’ve talked to her—”

“Something you weren’t supposed to do in the first place!” Maureen says. “You weren’t supposed to be able to get into that room!”

“…well, that’s that and this is this—”

“Lucas, aren’t you the one who said I should take charge of this situation?” Maureen snaps, holding her hand up to stop him.

“Yeah, because you _should_! Because I’m scared that we’re going to wind up waking up with our throats slit—”

“One, if that happened, we would not be waking up; two, do you not think I’m not taking every measure to protect ourselves? You said you trusted me, and I expect you to hold true to that. I am your mother and you need to trust that I will not let anything happen to you. I promise, Lucas, that you _are_ safe—”

“Yeah, and Dad said he was coming back!” Lucas shouts; Maureen reels, stepping back from him in shock. He shakes his head, cheeks pink. “And then he _died_! He never came back! Promises don’t work out, Mom, and I—I think that you’re not using your judgment correctly! She’s not right, there’s something not _right_ , I took a look in that journal you gave her and you said there wasn’t anything in it, but there was—and it looked _weird_ , it—I tried casting Charm Person on her, and it just bounced back, like she didn't even resist, it just didn't _touch_ her—”

Maureen holds her hand up, shaking her head. “Lucas. Stop. Stop now,” she says, voice low. “I understand that you are scared and you are upset. I understand, but under _no_ circumstances are you to _ever_ do that again. Do you hear me?”

“Mom, I had—”

“The only thing you have to do is go to your room. _Now_ ,” she says. “Now. And grab yourself a bowl of soup on your way out.”

“This isn’t _fair_ —“

“One,” Maureen says, anger and frustration crawling up her throat. Or maybe it’s her dinner that’s doing that. She’s not too sure.

“Mom,” Lucas starts, holding his hands out from his sides. “I’m telling you, that woman is sketchy!”

“Two,” Maureen continues. “Lucas Roman if you make me go to three—”

“Fine!” Lucas shouts, turning to wrench a cabinet open. “ _Fine_! Get us killed! See if I care—it’s not like we’re doing much of anything out here anyway! It's not like anyone will care if we die, we're already _dead_.”

Maureen watches with a detached fury as Lucas slams a bowl down and slops soup into it. She crosses her arms over her chest to keep her hands from shaking. He snatches a spoon from a drawer and scoops his bowl up and brushes past her.

“Lucas,” she says. Her voice is hoarse. “I love you. Your father loved you too. This is a decision we made together. I _know_ it's hard. But I love you.”

Lucas is quiet for a moment. “Yeah,” he mutters. “Yeah. Whatever.”

She clenches her jaw and holds her arms tighter around herself. She stands barefoot in the kitchen, arms wound around herself. She stares at the half-eaten apple on the countertop, a silent roar in her ears as she just stands. She licks her lips, and her breath shudders and she stares, she stares, she stares.

_“You, dear, need a nap,_ ” Lucian said when Lucas was six months and colicky and she had shouted in frustration as his cries from the nursery had interrupted her work again.

_“Just breathe_ ,” he’d said when Lucas was three and taking things apart and stringing their guts around the living room, wires and parts and unlaced boots and pages from books.

“ _You don’t have to be patient with him all the time, it’s okay_ ,” when Lucas was eight and refusing to do his schoolwork because he was ‘above it’ and all the teachers were frothing over the _wasted potential_ in him.

“ _This is difficult for him, just like it is for us,_ ” when Lucas was twelve and they had to move from Goldcliff to Neverwinter because of funding and Lucian’s position and Lucas was breaking things and shouting and Maureen was in near tears constantly, because how could she present her research when Lucas was out there sneering at the people who would go on to give them money? Who had their lives in their hands? Couldn’t he see that wouldn’t get them back home?

_“I’ll be back, I promise, it’s just a precaution, Kalen isn’t, there’s something not… Well, you saw. I want you to take Lucas and hide and once -------, I’ll--- and we, we’ll be alright, if I can keep him from ---- ---, then maybe --- ---. These ----- are---- and--”_

What was that? What was she doing? Standing like a fool, wishing Lucian was there with her to handle Lucas like he always had. She loves Lucas with her entire heart and soul but Lucian always knew when she was worn thin, when she needed a break; he got him to behave when he wouldn’t, got him to quiet when Maureen couldn’t, sang him to sleep when her lullabies weren’t enough and he was gone, and they were here, and they were stuck. Stuck in this endless loop of good good good, bad. It had been good for so long, and Lucretia had come through and struck the quiet waters of their life, and the ripples had spread into a tsunami of black feelings and guilt and empty lives.

She wipes her eyes with her sleeve, blinking in the dark room. Somehow, the sun had set. She hadn’t noticed at all.

She leaves the apple on the counter. She walks from the kitchen down the dark hall, standing for a moment outside of Lucas’ bedroom, where light spills bright from under the wooden and metal door. She touches the wall over the scanner softly, throat tight.

She turns and goes to her own room, where she pulls a cardigan from the floor, large and heavy and with a button-front and a cotton dress. She gathers up a pot of ink and one of her own quills and makes the trip back down to Lucretia’s room, eyes burning and heavy in her head.

“There you are,” Lucretia says in exasperation. “Listen, I get that dandelion is supposed to be good for you but I _think_ you’re just feeding me grass… Oh… hey, are you… Are you all right?”

Maureen blinks, cocking her head in surprise at the sudden change in Lucretia’s voice. “Yeah, I… yeah, here. I brought you some ink and a quill and some clothes. Sorry it took so long.”

“…I hope that it’s not because of me,” Lucretia says slowly. She takes the dress and cardigan; the dress she folds on the side of the bed, but the cardigan she slips on.

“No,” Maureen says, shaking her head. “It’s not _just_ you…”

She’d given her one of Lucian’s old sweaters, she realizes, mouth dry.

“If… if you’re good, I have things I need to do,” Maureen says, stepping backwards from the room.

Lucretia’s eyes follow her, dark and searching, but the woman simply nods. “Yes… goodnight, Maureen.”

“Goodnight.”

Maureen turns and flees before the door is even closed, winding her way deep into the lab. Away from the idea that her son chafes under who she’s becoming, away from the pieces and parts she’s had to scrape into a life, into the room she and Lucian spent their time in, where she can pretend she’s still part of a whole family.  

* * *

Lucas doesn’t come to breakfast. She makes muffins instead of pancakes because she refuses to feel guilty for keeping him safe, for being angry with him for deliberately disobeying her, for putting himself in danger. But she feels his absence keenly, feels the weight of his temper and hears the clattering in his workroom and knows he’s avoiding her to sulk. She has to remind herself that he’s allowed that space, that she has to let him have his privacy. She wants to barge in and force him to listen to her, to force him into compliance, but she knows that won’t work.

After all, wasn’t that why she left home all those years ago, desperate for a change and desperate for a breath of air away from the pressure of her family name and intelligence? Away from her father’s loving sternness and strict rules and long skirts? And she returned in her own time, for sure, because she had learned the hard way that Roman Miller was just a strict and stoic man and in his own way, he loved her, but she had decided the second she realized she was pregnant she would not parent the same way.

So she gave him space. She gave him freedom. She gave him a lot of things. Maybe she shouldn’t have given him so much. But she has to keep giving so he can learn.

She’s going to put beets in the oven. Beets with thyme, she thinks. Beet salad for dinner, and she’s going to enjoy every wrinkled nosed look Lucas is going to level at her when he finally emerges from his room.

She sighs and loads up a tray of food for Lucretia, checking her pocket to make sure the Stone of Farspeech is still there. She sets the tray down in the hall outside of Lucretia’s room, then makes the trip to her workroom to fetch the master security spell. She taps the holy symbol that acts as their secondary layer of defense with her ring, and it sinks back down onto her desk. She reaches into the security spell and removes the string of spell work that acts as a message interceptor, tucking the removed components into her pockets.

Nerves churn in her gut as she carries the globe back to Lucretia’s door. She presses her palm flat to the scanner, anxiousness making her feel jittery. She would feel better if Lucas was backing her up with this, but she knows she was right not to press him. And, at least, if things go wrong, at least the last thing she said to Lucas was that she loved him. There’s that to hold onto, but it’s a weak consolation.

The door pulls itself open and she leans forward, picking up the tray as she swallows hard.

“Good morning,” Lucretia murmurs to her, not looking up from where she has the blue journal open on her lap, one hand turning its pages as she writes with her other. She’s got the sleeves of Lucian’s old cardigan rolled up to her elbows, the sweater laughably large on her small frame.

Maureen swallows hard. “I have… I have your Stone,” she says softly. “And breakfast, medicine, bandages… but, yeah. I have your Stone.”

Lucretia looks up so quickly that her hair tumbles free of its clumsily done braid, curls spilling out and wild in a white halo around her face. “My—you, you were… do you really?”

“Yes,” Maureen says. “I told you I would… I decided I just had to trust you. I get the feeling, anyway, if I tried to spell you into telling me the truth, it wouldn’t work anyway. So…”

She sets the tray down on the table beside Lucretia’s bed and gingerly picks up the stone pendant. Her fingers shake as Lucretia holds out her hands, her eyes wide as Maureen places it in her upturned palms.

“Can… I actually _use_ it?” Lucretia asks, cupping her Stone between her palms like it’s made of pure gold. The wonder in her eyes is almost painful to look at. 

“Yes,” Maureen answers. She gestures to the security orb; “I’ve temporarily lifted the warding. I’ll put it back up when you’re finished.”

Lucretia nods absently, already pressing her thumb to the center of it.

Maureen turns her back to Lucretia, unaccustomed to the soft look she’d seen flit across her face. It makes her uncomfortable still, seeing Lucretia that human, that real.  It makes it so much harder to distance herself from this now that she sees Lucretia as another human being, another woman her own age who is intelligent and witty and so human. It was easier to think of her as cold and aloof, someone easy to dislike and clinically dissect.

She fiddles with the buttons on her coat, listening to the connection on the stone crackle, Lucretia murmuring under her breath against it, trying to strengthen the connection out of habit, rather than any excess of magic.

_“Missy! I nearly had a heart attack when this thing came on!”_

“Sorry, sorry,” Lucretia laughs. “I know it’s been a while.”

_“You a’right there, Lucretia? You sound a bit… well, yikes?”_

“I’m… I’m told I’ll make a full recovery,” Lucretia murmurs. Maureen trains her ears, ready to throw her spell back up to cut off the call. “I ran… afoul of a necromantic dungeon. I was in a bad way, and… I’ve been taken in by a family in… the village nearby. It’s going to be a while, I’m so sorry, Boyland.”

“ _Not a need, not a need—as long as y’re a’right. Davenport’s been agitated waiting t’hear from you._ ”

“Oh, oh no—can I—I haven’t been any state to call, I would have, but I’ve only, I’ve only just woken up, is he around?”

“ _Let me grab him—just a moment.”_

Maureen can hear the shaky breaths Lucretia takes to keep herself calm, and Maureen almost wants to copy the way she sucks in air—her own breath had left her in the surprise following Lucretia’s effortless lie.

There’s a shuffling on the other end of the line, then a voice cries out, “ _Davenport!”_

Lucretia actually sobs. Maureen turns despite herself, and is shocked to see Lucretia holding her Stone like she’s praying, fists pressed to her forehead.

“Hey,” she whispers, “Hey, I’m—I’m still okay, Dav, I’m alright—I didn’t, I didn’t, I’m sorry, I messed up real bad, and it’s gonna, it’s gonna be a while.”

“ _Davenport?_ ”

“I’ll come back, yeah. Yeah—do you, do you like it where you are? Are you having fun?”

And on, with Lucretia carrying the conversation—occasionally, the other voice, Boyland, will answer for the other man, but nothing else is said by the second man. Lucretia seems to know what he means, but Maureen’s chest aches with each passing moment. She turns, breath knocked out of her.

Lucretia’s smiling. It’s small, and it’s dampened a bit by the tears on her cheeks, but she’s smiling, a soft curve of lips and the barest strip of white teeth.

It’s so different from the sly, wry smile she’s seen the past few days. She doesn’t know Lucretia well at all, but she knows that smile. She’s seen it before—on Lucian, on Lucas, on her father, on herself. It’s the smile of someone who finds their homes not in places, but in people.

They’re in no danger at all; they never were.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried something new this chapter, and wrote a little running commentary on this chapter: [check it out on my tumblr?](http://bluecoloreddreams.tumblr.com/post/164045956939)


	10. Security Profiles

**Name:** Maureen Miller [ _Administrator_ ]  
**Status** : Active  
**Age:** 44  
**Print** : Whorl  
**Race** : Human  
**Classification:** Wizard [Transmutation, Divination], Druid ( _former_ )  
**Iris:** Green  
**Height:** 5’11”  
**Restrictions** : None  
**Clearance Level** : All  
**Notes:** None

* * *

 

 **Name:** Lucian Greene-Miller [ _Administrator_ ]  
**Status:** Inactive **  
****Age:** 41  
**Print:** Arch  
**Race:** Human  
**Classification:** Wizard [Conjuration, Divination] **  
****Iris:** Brown  
**Height:** 5’9”  
**Restrictions:** Inactive  
**Clearance Level:** Inactive  
**Notes:** Deceased

  
****

* * *

**Name:** Lucas Miller   
**Status:** Active  
**Age** : 16  
**Print:** Whorl  
**Race:** Human  
**Classification:** Wizard [Illusion, Transmutation ( _in training_ )]  
**Iris:** Brown  
**Height:** 5’9”  
**Clearance:** Restricted  
**Restrictions:** Rooms 2, 9; Lab 3; No access after 0200 local to outer doors, Labs 1-2, 4. Administrator permission required to overwrite security  protocols.  
**Notes:** Registered attempt at hacking (23); Scans after 0200 local from outer doors (3).  
_[[Mom I’m sixteen I don’t need a curfew]]_

* * *

**Name:** Lucretia [ _Withheld_ ]   
**Status:** Active   
**Age:** 45   
**Print:** Ulnar Loop   
**Race:** Human  
**Classification:** Wizard [Abjuration]  
**Iris:** Brown  
**Height:** 5’3.45”  
**Clearance:** Restricted  
**Restrictions** : Rooms 1, 3; Labs 3-4; No access to outer doors  after local sundown unless approved by an administrator. **  
** **Notes** : No biological totems given; vouched by Administrator. All scan-ins accompanied by (1) Administrator-approved talisman (bracelet; _moonstone, silver_ )


	11. Bridging

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we areeeeeeee a new chapter! I'd originally taken a break to work on a one-shot that turned into Down in the Valley, which whoops. Got away from me. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> Thanks to [epersonae](http://archiveofourown.org/users/epersonae/pseuds/epersonae)and [emi_rose](http://archiveofourown.org/users/emi_rose/pseuds/emi_rose) for some lovely edits to this and the whole WDA for putting up with me being grumpy about this chapter. Coming soon: some notes about this chapter on tumblr! If there's anything specific you want to see me talk about re:writing or what have you, feel free to hit me up!

“Thank you,” Lucretia whispers, her voice hoarse as she wipes her face with her palms. Her stone rests on her lap, silent and inactive once more. 

Maureen shakes her head, unwilling to sit down. She fidgets in the center of the room, wringing her hands together for a second. “No, no don’t thank me—I, I should have let you do that from the get-go,” she says softly. “Um. Just. Just let me know when you want to make a call, and I’ll take the wards down for you, okay?”

Lucretia nods, tracing the stone with her finger. “Thank you,” she repeats. “Thank you anyway. I know you think that—that it should have been easy to do this and it’s not worth being grateful over, but. But I know it was difficult. If it were me, it would have been difficult.”

She cups the stone between her palms, turning it back and forth as she speaks. “I mean, I’ve been there, and it _was_ difficult for me,” she says. “I had to make a choice between what was right and what was safe; what was easy and… What was easy and safe was not what was right. What was right, even… was doubtful at best.”

She lifts one palm and lets the stone fall out of it to the other, then repeats the motion, an idle back and forth as she sniffles back the last of her tears. “That. That was one of those things,” she says softly.

She pauses her movements, letting her hands fall to her lap as she fixes her eyes on Maureen. “I know you would like to ask me questions,” she murmurs.

“The person you spoke with, is he your son?”

Lucretia chuckles and shakes her head. “No, dear me, no. Davenport… well, he _is_ my ward. Once, we were colleagues… but. Unfortunately… he… he’s not who he was anymore,” she whispers.  

“Were you… by chance,” Maureen presses, “Part of the War?”

Lucretia’s eyes are sharp, her mouth pressing into a thin line of suspicion as her brows draw in tight. “What do _you_ know about the War?” she asks bluntly.

“My… my late husband,” Maureen starts. She feels a bit hazy, like always when she tries to think about Lucian’s last few months. “He was… he was part of the militia, you see.”

“Ah.”

The acquiescence is like a sigh, and the aggression that had tightened Lucretia’s frame bleeds from her.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she murmurs. “Truly. I have traveled this continent extensively, and that war, Maureen, was _senseless_. So many people lost homes, lives, loved ones… and for what?”

“I don’t remember,” Maureen breathes. “I knew it once, but I don’t know it now. I know all these… useless, useless things about it. How many people died, what cities just were… decimated, wiped off the map, what sorts of spells, what weapons were used… Utter _junk_. Absolutely useless. But when I try… I knew it once; I thought I understood it, but…”

Lucretia nods absently; Maureen steps back, leaning against the desk at the other side of the room.  

“Senseless,” Lucretia repeats. “Wholesale destruction. And no one remembers, and I… I am so sorry, Maureen.”

Maureen shrugs and trails her finger against the edge of the desk. “I mean, it’s been, oh… oh, it’s been about two years now, I think. It’s nothing you were directly responsible for,” she says weakly, forcing herself to laugh.

Lucretia is quiet for a moment as she traces the line of bandages around her hand. “Is that how long you’ve been here?” she asks.

Maureen looks up, brows furrowed and lips pursed tight.

Lucretia holds her hands up in surrender at the fierceness on Maureen’s face. “It’s just, if your husband was in the militia, you must have lived in a town, once.”

“I’d… prefer not to talk about it,” Maureen says softly.

Lucretia nods. “Understandable. As far as I know, you’ve always lived in your strange little home in the woods.”

Maureen drums her fingers against her thigh, filled with a fidgety sort of energy that’s begging her to clean the laboratory or dig up a plot of flowers.

She doesn’t act on it. Instead, she crosses her legs at the ankles and surveys Lucretia. “Do you feel up to a tour?” Maureen asks.

“Do I have to sit in a rolling chair?”

“Yes,” Maureen laughs, “Sorry, it’s the most convenient choice. I _promise_ I won’t crash you.”

Lucretia purses her lips and sighs. “I suppose it’s not too much to ask for a real bath, is it?”

“I think your wounds are well enough for that,” Maureen agrees. “Once you eat, I’ll do a double check, and then, we can have our tour. I need to register you to the system, and we’ll have to pick out a totem for you, since… well, you haven’t changed your mind, have you?”

Lucretia shakes her head, reaching for the tray with her nearly forgotten breakfast. As she eats, Maureen settles in at the desk, shuffling through the notes she’d left behind when she was spending her day watching over Lucretia’s comatose body. She starts separating them out into piles—usable ideas and trash. Most of them go into the trash. She tries not to be disheartened by how many dead-end ideas she has, but it’s hard. There’s so many limitations to what she can do—not just here, in her home, but on this _plane_.

She’s sure that once, she and Lucian had been on the brink of something large. She feels like something from all of her hypotheses, something critical, is missing. More than just the absence she feels in her notes where Lucian used to be.

She sighs and turns to Lucretia, “So.”

“So?” Lucretia asks with a mouthful of muffin.

“Oh gods, does no one close their mouths when they eat?”

Lucretia covers her mouth with her hand and swallows, “Sorry, sorry. Didn’t think. It’s been a while since I’ve—sorry.”

Maureen shakes her head dismissively. “Are you ever… Are you ever going to tell me how on Pan’s green earth you know about the planes of existence?”

Lucretia purses her lips and looks down at her food. She tears a piece of her muffin off slowly, rolling it between her fingers.

“I’m a wizard, of course I know about the planes,” she mumbles. “You go _somewhere_ when you cast Blink, and when you make pocket dimensions… the materials have to...the energy expended by utilizing components comes from _somewhere_. It’s the only way teleport spells work, if there’s another point in space that can bend to take you—”

“Elaborate,” Maureen cuts in.

“It’s like folding paper? But because where we are doesn’t change, there’s somewhere else,” Lucretia says vaguely. She rips off another piece of muffin and starts to roll it to the first ball. “…less paper, more string,” she corrects, sounding distant. “The things that tie us, tie everything, it’s those strings…”

“And how does that happen?”

Lucretia shifts, shrugging. “Magic,” she says. “The… energy we pull from, the Weave or what-have-you, it allows for an infolding of the material world around us— time, space it… creates a wrinkle, like in fabric, and with the right amount and the right concentration, you step. And you’re there. The spell taps the right frequency of energy, and the energy lets you fold the superimposed plane—they’re, they’re layered, close here, the material ones—and you… just, go.”

“You just described a tesseract,” Maureen says. “You shouldn’t know that.”

Lucretia looks over at Maureen, face pinching in confusion. “Pardon?”

“Literally _no one_ knows what you just said,” Maureen answers. “No one knows that. We never shared our findings.”

“No one?” Lucretia questions, her voice wavering just slightly. “At all? Surely…”

“No one,” Maureen says. “Lucian and I had only recently discovered the nature of planar spells before he died. There was no time to—Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m just me,” Lucretia says quietly. “I’m no one special.”

Maureen picks up her notes and furiously scrutinizes them for any speck of information that Lucretia could have gleaned. After several minutes, she finds none at all and turns back to Lucretia in exasperation.

“Listen. You’re incredibly powerful,” she says. “Don’t try to deny it. There’s no other way that you could have broken through all the wards and enchantments that surround this place. My husband and I—we worked very hard to make it so that no one would ever find this place. We stored things here that this world can’t even _fathom_ , and we used the highest spells we could muster—and _more_.”

Maureen stands and strides towards the bed, tipping Lucretia’s face up to hers. Her eyes, for all her playacting at shy and nervous, are flinty, dark brown with rings of gold; Maureen looks at her, scrutinizing her gaze and the lines of her face and the delicate white wisps of curls that fall against her temple. Her eyelashes and brows are just as light against her dark skin; Maureen has never seen someone quite like her, not even in people from other regions of Aber-Toril.

She’s never seen anyone with as much steel-tipped composure; there’s something in her face that speaks of years that Maureen isn’t sure she’ll ever see, reminding her of the oldest druid she’d ever met, of the elven woman who taught her to compound her medicines in the twilight of her life—centuries and centuries of knowledge. The meekness, the lack of concrete knowledge, the befuddlement—it’s all a veneer to put Maureen at ease. But she can see it, because she’s put on her own face so many times before: a silly woman, a simple housewife, clumsy and untrained—it’s how she’s managed to stay alive this long.  

“Who are you?” Maureen repeats. “How do you know these things? How did you know about my mirror? Don’t say you don’t know, because I know you do. I would prefer to refrain from using spells, but some of this—you shouldn’t know.”

Lucretia’s brows furrow briefly and she then sighs, eyes falling shut in defeat.

“I told you, I look for powerful magical items,” she says. “I’ve… traveled my whole life. Dedicated my life to researching and chronicling the things I’ve seen; everything I’ve found, every piece of magic I’ve scraped together, some of them are without rival. I’ve been places you’ve never even seen or heard of, places that just don’t exist anymore, too—and I’ve seen the end of these things, too. The people who made them, who understood, who have traveled with me or I visited on my travels; they’re gone and, in their absence, I try to find the meaning of it all. It sounds, Maureen, like we are of similar professions. After a fashion, of course.”

“You’re an arcane theorist,” Maureen whispers, her hand falling from Lucretia’s face. “How did we never come across you before?”

“My work is best accomplished alone. I don’t make a habit of discussing my work more than necessary.”

“What else do you know?” Maureen asks. “Are there other mirrors out there?”

Lucretia shakes her head. “I’ve never seen anything like yours,” she says softly. “Just transient passages. …May I have my bath now?”

Maureen recoils at the sudden shift in topic, put off by Lucretia’s unwillingness to speak. While she’s not as standoffish as she had been before, Lucretia’s avoidance of certain topics drives Maureen wild; there are things that Maureen is certain Lucretia knows of, things that Maureen has dedicated her entire life to just to even have an  _inkling_ of. It’s infuriating. 

Maureen has to remind herself that Lucretia doesn’t owe her anything other than her promise not to harm her and Lucas.

But oh, the things this woman could tell her—oh, the conversations they could _have_. She longs for the simple pleasures of sitting with an equal, someone who could speak her language and understand.

“Yeah, let me get my chair and some clothes for you.”

“I’m… the chair, I—are we sure that’s safe?”

“Yeah, it’s cool,” Maureen says with a laugh.

* * *

“I can’t believe you cast levitate on yourself,” Maureen grumps, handing Lucretia a towel.

Lucretia takes it gratefully, laying it across her lap as her feet still dangle into the underground river. “I would have died otherwise,” she says lightly, holding out her arms as Maureen kneels to sponge excess water off of the worst of her wounds.

“The ride was a little bumpy. A little,” Maureen mutters, checking the site of Lucretia’s pulled stitches, tenderly pressing the inflamed flesh. Lucretia winces, jaw tight with pain; a whimper escapes her lips. “This is doing okay, but I’m going to need to put an extra round of salve on it later. Are you done bathing or do you want to laze around a bit more?”

“I think I’m done,” Lucretia answers, picking up the towel to start sponging her skin off. “Not to diss on how much you’ve been taking care of me but, I _really_ needed that bath.”

“No, I hear you, bathing can do wonders.”

She helps Lucretia to her feet, then to the offending rolling chair. “Can you stand long enough to get you dressed or do you need to sit?”

Lucretia winces, hand on her stomach and broken ankle lifted to keep her weight off of it. “Sit,” she says.  Her voice is faint with pain, and her complexion is beginning to gray. “Please.”

“Okay,” Maureen murmurs, helping Lucretia down into the chair. “Sit for a moment, it’s okay.”

“It’s frustrating,” Lucretia murmurs. “I’m so—I, why can’t I just bounce back?”

She shakes under Maureen’s touch, dropping her face into her hands. Maureen carefully drapes the towel over her shoulders, and then picks up the pile of clothes just to have something to do with her hands.

“I know it must be wearisome,” Maureen says lightly. “But the extent of your injuries, people just… most people don’t come back from that. You’ve been incredibly lucky, and given your age and how badly you were injured— it’s going to take some time to properly heal. As it is, it’s only been a week since you were injured; I know it must seem like more, but. You need the time and the rest.”

“I don’t have _time_ ,” Lucretia murmurs. “I just—I’m sorry, it must sound like I’m criticizing you, but I… I miss my family. I want to go, I want to leave, I want to—I _have_ to.”

“It’s all right.” Maureen pauses, and kneels near Lucretia, gently placing the clothes on her knees. “It really is. You’re tired, you’re feeling weak, and you’re in someone else’s care. I understand. You’re stuck for who knows how long, unable to leave under your own steam. I understand; it’s a valid complaint. I’m sorry I kept you feeling helpless, but we’re going to fix some of that today. You’ll feel better once you’re able to move around freely while you heal, and hopefully find you some stuff that you can do to keep you occupied so the time goes quickly.”

“You don’t _get_ it,” Lucretia mumbles into her palms. “I failed, I fucked up, and I don’t know if I can ever fix it if I sit here and wait for everything to get better.”  

Maureen sighs softly. “I’ll tell you what I tell Lucas, what _I_ was told when I was younger: If you rush, you won’t reach the result you want. You’ll be more likely to mess up and have to redo everything. It seems like, for you, doing it right the first time is what you want, right? So it’s better to take your time so that it goes right the way you need it to, without hurting yourself again.”

Lucretia shakes her head for a moment before sighing deeply. “I just… this is a catastrophic setback for me. I needed to have succeeded…”

“Not all setbacks are for forever,” Maureen says softly. “Even all this, here, is temporary. In an existential sense, life is temporary,” she muses, trailing off as her mind wanders to the world within her mirror.

She shakes herself of the thought, then lightly rests her fingertips on Lucretia’s shoulder.

“How about a tour to get you settled, make you feel a little more at home?” she asks. “Then we’ll set you up with the security system and in a few days time you’ll be a bit more mobile and feel better.”

“I suppose,” Lucretia murmurs.

Lucretia struggles to stand so that she can dress herself. She leans heavily into Maureen when she offers her arm, unable to complete the simple task of pulling the dress and cardigan on without trembling.

Maureen helps her settle back down into the chair, watching as Lucretia’s face screws up with frustration as she shakes with effort.  Her mouth trembles as she turns up the cuffs of her sweater several times to free her hands.

She’s absolutely fascinating to watch: Lucretia is small, but she’s all wiry muscle and calloused fingers that twist her hair into braids with a swiftness that Maureen could never manage with her own thick hair.

Although each of Lucretia’s movements are quick, her air screams defeat: Once she’s done with righting her hair and clothes, her shoulders slack and her hands fall into her lap with a heaviness that Maureen recognizes and is uncomfortable with. She doesn’t know what to do when she’s faced with her own demons, much less a stranger’s.

She pushes Lucretia along much more carefully than before, pointing out doors and labs and chattering on desperately. It feels like every sentence falls and clatters to the floor with the heaviness of Lucretia’s silence. She almost wants to shake the woman—where is the spitfire anger she’d seen before? Where is the woman that blew their door to smithereens? Where has all the stubbornness suddenly gone?

Lucretia’s sudden melancholy is almost palpable, like toothache aggravated by a probing tongue—Maureen already feels smothered enough here without Lucretia’s dreariness adding to the gloom. 

She pushes Lucretia through the natural pathways in the underground quarry towards her gardens.

Maureen’s easiest source of peace in the compound are her gardens. She has several: Vegetables, herbs, a small stand of apple trees, and a flower garden outside of the cottage portion of their home.

While she’s uncomfortable calling her gardens her pride and joy (because there is Lucas, of course; not to mention all of her inventions), they never cease to cheer her up when she’s down. There are so many reasons why: The research that went into breeding the strains so they’ll grow in the cave systems; the ingenuity behind growing and planning the underground plots; the ease with which they go wild without her touch. Everything about the gardens soothe her in ways that her research sometimes cannot.

She can’t remain unhappy for long when she’s in any of her gardens, even the ones she’s left for Lucas to tend. She hopes that perhaps, the same will be true for Lucretia. 

“This is the vegetable garden!” Maureen declares happily. “We maintain it with automatons, spelled to detect weeds and ambient conditions like soil condition and temperature. I bred the variants here to grow with less sunlight than the usual strains, more tolerant of moisture, and to slurp up more nutrients from the soil. Took a bit of time and a lot of selective breeding, but we’ve got something fairly self-sustaining here.”

“So. Why are there… Are those _scorch marks_ on the walls?” Lucretia asks.

Maureen pauses, feeling her face begin to warm as she studies the blackened stone of the sinkhole their garden resides in. Noontime sunshine beams down over the netting at the top of the hole, making the marks seem a bit blacker than they truly are.

Maybe.

“Oh. Uh. Well that. Um. We uh, Lucas, you see, designed a… a weeding spell to go into the minders, since I can’t stomach weeding—the plants are just doing their best, y’know? I can’t bear tugging them up,” she sighs. “Especially since a lot of them are useful. Dandelion, for instance—oh, don’t make that face, it’s good for you, but. The spell, was um. Ah, it was… a bit… It was a little overzealous.”

“But you let him do it anyway?”

“Oh, no, I programmed it in. Just… just as he wrote it.”

Lucretia turns her gaze towards her, and Maureen feels herself go red underneath her scrutiny. “Even though you knew?”

Maureen shifts from foot to foot, hands fluttering together as she speaks. “Lucas was really proud of it, and he’d been in a funk, so? I just? I told him I skipped a component? By accident?”

Lucretia hums pensively, and then raises an eyebrow. “You didn’t tell him?”

“Listen, I know,” Maureen says, holding a hand up. “I know, I should let him learn from his mistakes—sent him back to redo his equations. I just… I _know_ I’m too soft on him.”

Lucretia looks at the garden, folding her hands on her lap. “Well. If you know,” she says, giving a soft chuckle. “What was it? Better to do it once slowly than to do it twice?”

“Yes, yes,” Maureen groans. “Don’t call me out.”

“Oh, no. I was just wondering,” Lucretia says, and Maureen is pleased to see her lips twitch up into a small smile.

“Anyway,” Maureen continues, “We grow almost all of our vegetables. Some of the stuff, we just… y’know, conjure, if it’s something that won’t grow or is too complicated. Grains and corn and all that, well, we just buy those when we go to town.”

“What’s that?” Lucretia asks. She gestures towards a small shock of red and green leaves. A small smile makes its way across her face, scrunching her eyes up as she regards the placard she’s pointing at.

“Oh those are our beet… That little snot.”

Lucretia laughs loudly as Maureen kneels at a small sign that reads _Beta vulgaris,_ **_poisonous_ ** in spiky handwriting, flourished with a stick figure with crossed out eyes and a skull.

“It almost makes one wonder if that spell was _supposed_ to blow up the garden,” Lucretia says lightly as Maureen pockets the placard.

“I swear to gods above, if he did that on purpose to get to my beets—”

“I have to ask,” Lucretia says after a moment more of laughter. “What’s with the beets? I’ve eaten… well, you’ve served a lot of beets. And a _lot_ of dandelion.”

“They’re both highly medicinal plants,” Maureen mutters, lips pursing into what Lucretia can only categorize as a pout. “So yeah, okay dandelion tastes a little… strong, but I happen to enjoy beets.”  

“No accounting for taste, huh? Essentially you’re feeding us beets and…grass.”

“Actually, dandelion isn’t a grass,” Maureen says, frowning. “They’re in different… Oh, never mind. But beets! I like them, but it’s sort of a family joke. It’s a great pun you see, because-because I’m _beeting_ him when he’s in trouble—get it? I feed him beets as a punishment. It’s great.”

“… _geesh_ ,” Lucretia groans. “God. No wonder the kid hates them. I should have let you take me out with the rolly chair.”

“Oh, I think it’s funny, it was one of mine and Lucian’s better ones since people said we didn’t discipline him right,” Maureen says airily, wheeling Lucretia out of the garden. She nudges the chair on with a little magic, delighted with the way Lucretia continues to mutter under her breath about beets.

“Now that we’re in a better mood, let’s get you set up with a security totem,” Maureen says with a laugh.

“How does that work, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Oh, well. I just have you pick out some things, and… I mean, magic,” Maureen laughs, pressing her hand up against the security scanner to her secondary security lab.

“Magic,” Lucretia says dryly. “Of course.”

“It’ll make more sense to explain as I do it,” Maureen says dismissively. She nudges Lucretia inside.

Lucretia peers about the room—it’s filled with odds and ends and shimmering gemstones, flickering lights, and a workbench piled with metal wire and jewelers’ tools. “Are you sure you’re not an artificer yourself?”

Maureen shrugs and pushes Lucretia forward towards the bench. “Well. Not really,” she answers, rummaging about. She pulls out a tray of stones and a length of silver cord. “Like I said, that was my husband’s specialty. I invent things. Some of them are magic, sure.”

“But not all of them are, is it?” Lucretia finishes.

She turns and shrugs, giving a sly grin at the calculating look Lucretia gives her. “Not everyone has magic, you know? It takes a lot to learn spells, and some people just aren’t inclined,” Maureen says. “Hand, please?”

Lucretia holds out her wrist; Maureen measures a length of cord around it, then picks up a pair of wire cutters, snipping the cord to the right length. She settles down at her bench, plucking a set of catches from a shallow dish. She affixes one, but sets the other aside.

“We—my family—have always been innovators,” Maureen says. She runs her finger down the length of cord, setting down the first level of spells. “Name.”

“Lucretia.”

“Last name?”

“It’s...” Lucretia trails off uncomfortably. “I don’t have one,” she finally whispers.  

“Okay. Age?”

Another uncomfortable pause. Maureen looks over her shoulder and raises an eyebrow. “I know it’s not polite to ask a lady her age,” she says with a snort, “But we’re both women here.”

“Oh, no, I just had to think,” Lucretia says with a shrug. Her hand presses to her ribs. “I’m about forty-five… give or take a month or so?”

Maureen feeds the information into the spell. “Specialization.”

“Wardings.”

“Height?”

“…Five four,” Lucretia mutters, looking away.

“Tell the truth.”

“Ugh. It’s five three and some change,” she sighs.

Maureen snickers and pulls out an inkpad. “First, I need to you pick a gem from the tray to the right. Then, ink your thumb, and press it to the gem. After that, I need you to do the same to your entire hand, and press it to this parchment.”  

Maureen hands Lucretia the tray of gemstones, watching her as she sorts through them, carefully rolling each between her fingers before dropping them. There’s something interesting about watching her take it so seriously; there’s a curiosity in each glance that tells Maureen that Lucretia is categorizing each instruction, weighing them against her own knowledge. It’s as relieving to know that the work is being appreciated as it is wonderful to realize that Lucretia seems to understand the basics of what she’s doing.

Eventually, Lucretia settles on one of the uncut gemstones. It’s a rough-edged hunk of white-blue rock, that flashes blue when she passes it to Maureen.

“Moonstone, huh?” Maureen muses. She scrawls out the next part of the spell onto the parchment, placing the stone in the center of where Lucretia has pressed her palm. “I haven’t really worked much with this one before.”

“Should I choose another?”

“No, no, it’s better to go with your first choice,” Maureen muses. “It’s easier to keep up the spell if the materials are things that you like; it’s also less likely that you’ll take it off.”

“I see,” Lucretia muses. “So I have to keep it on then?”

“If you want to wander around the house, yes.” Maureen presses her thumb onto a pad of ink, and then presses her print onto the page. She folds it and tucks it into her pocket. “I’ll feed this to the master spell later. Now. Arm?”

“I thought you said you would explain,” Lucretia challenges, holding her arm out.

Maureen laughs at the upward tip to Lucretia’s jaw, the set of her shoulders. Her hand is small and delicate between her fingers as she grasps it. “I suppose I did,” Maureen concedes. “But you’ve been watching like a hawk, so I think some of the details can be skipped.”

She loops the cord around Lucretia’s wrist, measuring it again. She presses two fingers to the underside of Lucretia’s wrist, feeling the thin tendons there between her pulse point. She whispers a spell, and two knots bloom under her fingers, settling into the braided wire cord. She straightens the cord and lays it on her desk, plucking the moonstone with the inky thumbprint from the desk.

“This bracelet is spelled to become more attuned to you the more you wear it,” Maureen explains, fusing the gem into the cord, right between the two knots. “In time, it could be further modified to become an arcane focus, if you’d like. The security spells are made to recognize certain magical signatures; Lucian modified a Detect Magic spell _ages_ ago, and it’s working off of that modification. Non-standard, won’t find it in any sort of book, but that’s the nature of things here.”

“I see,” Lucretia muses, studying the bracelet.

“Do you really?”

Lucretia shrugs. “I think so, but only because I’ve dabbled in modifying spells myself,” she says idly, turning it slowly. “The stone contains a counter spell that suppresses the locking spell on your doors. The hands scan is… what? For show?”

“Oh, well, on some doors, yes,” Maureen says. She twists a piece of wire between her fingers. “On others, it really does read your handprint.”

“How?” Lucretia asks. “And which ones?”

“I… would rather not divulge, I hope you understand,” Maureen murmurs.

Lucretia studies her for a moment. “I do,” she says slowly. “Now… if you don’t mind, I think I need to return to bed.”

Maureen nods and rises slowly. “Yes, it’s probably that time. Is there anything you’d like?”

“If it’s not too much trouble, may I have something to read?”

“I can do you better; I can give you access to the library. We can pop in there right quick on the way to your bedroom.”

* * *

“Okay,” Maureen says. “Are you ready to get those stitches out?”

Lucretia looks up from the carefully bound journal she’s reading—Maureen recognizes it as one of her grandfather’s research notes. Lucretia’s been reading voraciously for the past week, moving from spell books to novels to the old logs from Lucian’s days in the militia. It’s a little unsettling to watch, actually; Lucretia’s eyes barely even flick across a page before she turns it.

(She’s caught herself wondering if Lucretia is even human, but her body had seemed mortal enough when it was bleeding out on her laboratory floor, so she pushes the thought away.)

“No,” she says, eyeing Maureen and leaning back into her pillows. She covers her stomach protectively. “It hurts still, so maybe we should, uh… keep them in.”

“Too bad!” Maureen says cheerfully, plopping down at the side of Lucretia’s bed. “It’s been longer than it should be, honestly. I should have taken them out two days ago, but I _was_ worried about how deep the wounds were.”

“Oh, I… they could be left in,” Lucretia coaxes. “Maybe until you knock me out?”

“I need you to be awake,” Maureen says. “I brought some alcohol, though! It shouldn’t hurt a lot, I promise.”

Lucretia eyes Maureen suspiciously, then shrugs. “Well, alright. If you say so.”

“It’s just gonna be a little tug,” Maureen promises. She passes her the shot glass and pours her a generous amount of vodka.

Lucretia scowls, looking between  the glass and Maureen. “I don’t trust this,” she says, then tosses the shot back. “Oh well.”

Maureen sighs and begins to ready herself for the process, dipping her hands and her instruments in a small pan of alcohol as Lucretia sheds her sweater.

Maureen presses her fingers to the first wound, biting her lip. The skin’s grown over a little more than it really should have—but not so much that she’ll have to make a new incision. “I’m going to start now,” she warns.

Lucretia balls her fists up into the sheets and sets her jaw. “Okay,” she says faintly.

“You’ve never had stitches?” Maureen asks conversationally, trying to fit the tip of her forceps underneath the knot.

Lucretia inhales sharply, muscles jumping with tension. “I have,” she says faintly. “But they dissolved as I healed.”

“Oh, the spelled sort, no. I suppose you don’t have to remove those. You traveled with a cleric, then?”

“Yes,” Lucretia whimpers as Maureen gently eases the forceps through the knot. She snips just as Lucretia cries out faintly.

“It’s—that’s really—”

“I did a sloppy job, this is going to hurt,” Maureen admits after a moment. “They’re tighter than I should have done them, but…”

“I was dying, I get it— _shit_ ,” Lucretia swears, gasping as Maureen tugs up on another knot. “That’s not a little tug! Oh, oh _stop!_ ”

“It’s going to get worse the deeper I get in here, just grit your teeth—or scream, or, whatever, but I can’t stop.”

“It _hurts_ ,” Lucretia gasps emphatically, twisting her fingers deeper into the sheets. She turns her head and inhales sharply as Maureen gets her scissors underneath another knot. “It hurts a lot, _shit_.”

“Try going through childbirth,” Maureen murmurs, deftly snipping the next stitch as Lucretia hisses in pain, her breath shuddering with tears.

“Who’s to say I haven’t,” Lucretia snaps, drawing her knees up as far as she can without actively kneeing Maureen in the face. “ _Fuck_!”

“You said you didn’t have any family other than your ward,” Maureen says absently. She tugs the knot up, then snips, and tugs it out to add to the pile. She gingerly wipes away the ooze of blood and starts on the next.

“Doesn’t mean shit,” Lucretia gasps, voice cracking. “Please, please, stop—please.”

“I can give you a moment,” Maureen soothes. “Tell me about your family, then.”

“Don’t have any right now,” Lucretia pants, wiping her face with the back of her hand. She shudders and sobs again, breath hitching as she tries to calm herself. “I used to—I used to have more, but. Not anymore.”

“They died in the War?”

Lucretia shrugs. “Oh, get it over with,” she says hoarsely. “Better than hashing this out.”

“I’m sorry,” Maureen repeats. “It’s just—these are tricky, okay? I’ve got three more on this run and you can take a short break.”

“Just get it done with,” Lucretia begs.

“Here, take another,” Maureen urges, nodding towards the shot glass and liquor.

Lucretia pours herself a shot with shaking hands and tips it back. “Okay.”

“Talk to me while I do it,” Maureen instructs, picking up her scissors and forceps again.

“I left them behind,” Lucretia says, then falls silent save for a whine of pain. “It was for the best. Oh, god.”

“Just a few more. …There, that was the last one, you can lay back.”

Lucretia covers her face up and shudders back a sob. “I left them; I deserve this, just go on.”

Maureen leans back and studies Lucretia’s shivering body. Her wound oozes, and her stomach flinches with every breath. It’s strange, to see the woman who had laughed at her while she was bleeding out is reduced to this.

But then, shock does funny things to a person.

She lays a hand on Lucretia’s thigh, reaching out with her free hand to pinch her chin between her thumb and forefinger. “No one deserves to suffer,” she says sternly, adopting the tone she uses on Lucas. “This is going to pass, and you are going to feel silly. The pain is temporary at the worst. Now. I am going to pull out the rest of these stitches, and you are going to tell me about yourself, your family, the books you liked the best from the library—anything.”

Lucretia balks at her, mouth parted on a quiet sob. She drops her hands after wiping her face, twisting a portion of the sheets between her fingers.

“Yes,” she agrees.

* * *

Lucretia does not have a last name. She is interested in the source of magic and how it travels through the planes. She paints and she writes. She has written books—including a serial in the Neverwinter times that’s been syndicated to other small papers; she thinks Lucas might recognize it—he’s always been fond of such things.

She is forty-five years old, and her birthday is in the winter, on the solstice. She grew up in a place that was warm, always warm and she describes the sunlight so vividly that Maureen can almost feel it.

Her favorite color is blue, and she wants to avenge her family.

Maureen cleans her wounds and bandages them with fresh gauze and sits while Lucretia talks, her words slow and hoarse and sad as she describes each thing with detail; how she struggles with the choices she’s made, how it haunts her at night, to be so far away from her only remaining family member. Why she searches the world for the things she does, so that no one else will have to see the things she’s seen.

In the span of a few hours, Maureen feels like she’s learned more about this woman than she has in the weeks she’s been convalescing.

While Lucretia sleeps, Maureen silently removes most of the restrictions on Lucretia’s security profile.

* * *

“Lucas, Lucas, did you—did you fix my calculations?” Maureen calls, leaning close to the parchment.

“No,” Lucas says, looking up from his table of parts. “No, why would I do that? Was there something wrong with them?”

Maureen sets the paper down, frowning deeply. “Well, yes—I mean, I didn’t realize until just now, when I saw it,” she says. “There were some… errors. Uh, bad ones.”

“Bad as in, we just waste components or bad as in we all die a horrible, flaming death?” Lucas asks, scooting back to look over his mother’s shoulders.

“Uh, the last one.”

“Did _you_ do it?”

“Why would I be asking _you_ , Lucas, if _I_ did it?” Maureen sighs.

“Good point,” Lucas says slowly, adjusting his glasses. “Are you sure though, like, that you just haven’t forgotten? You’re getting really close to fif—”

“Are you sure _you_ don’t want to be grounded?” Maureen snaps.

“It was me.”

Maureen and Lucas turn towards the door. Lucretia, stands in the hallway outside holding a small stack of scrolls and soft-bound journals that Maureen recognizes as her own records, left out in the kitchen where they’re completely fair game.

Maureen distinctly remembers telling Lucretia she needed to rest, since she’d tripped and hurt her already injured ankle two days before, but the woman’s as stubborn as a mule.   

“I uh, I… I was bored, and went looking for something to read and you’d left it out on the bench, and it was… well, surely you didn’t _want_ to cause an explosion? Because if you did, well. Oops?”

“You were bored,” Maureen repeats.

“So you… did—you did planar physics?” Lucas asks.

Maureen and Lucas trade looks; Lucas raises his eyebrows and gapes at his mother. Maureen turns to Lucretia, who at least has the decency to look sheepish.

“Sorry?” she offers with a shrug.  

Maureen shakes her head. Lucas presses against her shoulders, taking a closer look at her papers.

“No, no don’t be,” Maureen stammers. “I—thanks.”

“It isn’t a problem. I do think blowing up would be a damper on everyone’s day,” Lucretia says lightly. “Would be on mine, at least.”

“Certainly,” Maureen agrees. Lucas reaches over her shoulders, eyebrows inching ever-higher up his brow until his glasses slide to the tip of his nose.

“This is—how,” Lucas mutters, “We missed, mom, how—we missed _all_ of that?”

“It’s a decimal issue; easy to distinguish if you’re a fresh set of eyes,” Lucretia says, looking a bit discomfited at the way both Lucas and Maureen turn to look at her. “I’m gonna… leave, now?”

“Yes… yeah, um just let me know next time? And use your cane!” Maureen shouts after her, watching as the woman turns and limps away, hands moving to shuffle open a book as she walks, shoulder propped up against the wall.

“Mom, put your eyes back in your head,” Lucas hisses, nudging her to the side.

Maureen shakes her head, like a dog shaking water off of its fur. She knows that Lucretia is a highly skilled wizard, and has a lot of theoretical knowledge, especially since Lucretia’s been devouring the archives of the Miller family’s records. But she’s been dodgy about revealing how much she understands the family research. This is beyond Maureen’s wildest expectations.  

“Give me that,” she snaps at Lucas. “And my eyes are very firmly in my head, thank you.”

“Yeah, yeah right,” Lucas laughs, settling onto the bench beside Maureen.

She wraps an arm around him, lips pursed as she studies the corrected numbers. Lucas grabs her pen, starting to scratch out new sketches as she reads out the new equations. His knee bounces as they work, and occasionally she knocks it with her own.

“You know what that means, though,” Lucas finally says.

“Huh?”

“If she can do this just because she’s bored, it makes you wonder what she can do when she’s focusing,” Lucas points out. “She’s been reading precisely _all_ of our shit.”

“What? You want her to help out around the lab, Luke?”

Lucas looks at her, eyebrow raised and mouth pinched flat. Maureen recognizes the attitude immediately. “Oh, don’t give me that look.”

“Mom, _really_ ?” he sighs. “No, I mean we should be _careful_. She could be a spy. She obliterated our security with one spell when she broke in. You said she knows all sorts of weird stuff she shouldn’t.”

“Lucas, she was half dead,” Maureen points out. “I doubt she’s a spy of any sort. And if she was, don’t you think she would have left by now?”  

“I’m just saying, it’s just… someone just falls into our house with exact knowledge of our research? We should at least ask what happened to her,” he says mulishly.

“Electric, venomous, ooze drake, wasn’t it?”

“Mom,” Lucas sighs. “Those don’t exist.”

“Tell that to it,” Maureen says idly, tapping her finger against the elegant scrawl of Lucretia’s handwriting on her notes.

* * *

As the weeks go by, Maureen finds herself seeking out Lucretia. At first, she was prone to running into the other woman at random—catching her in the kitchen making tea, or running into her in one of the general laboratories. She’s seen her writing, reading—even dozing. Her company, while sometimes infuriating due to Lucretia’s propensity to suddenly play dumb when the conversation gets too personal, it’s also infinitely comforting to have the company  of another adult who is, in Maureen’s eyes, her equal.

Since having her stitches removed, Lucretia hasn’t divulged too much more about herself—sure, she’s finally let Maureen coax her into discussions about theoretical arcana and planar research. They’ve spent several nights in a row bickering about alternate universe theories, most of which Lucretia picks apart with a dry skepticism that rubs Maureen entirely the wrong way. _(“The math says—” “The math is based on an entirely idiotic concept that the same people run about in circles for all eternity.”_ ) Lucretia inquires more about some of the more benign spells around the compound, and helps troubleshoot some of the more obscure issues. She has a delicate hand with spell construction that has Maureen doubting her claims of not being an artificer.

The morning of her and Lucas’ monthly trip into the city rises, and while Lucas readies the automated cart they’ve magicked into looking like a proper horse and carriage, Maureen finds herself a bit anxious to see Lucretia before they leave.

It isn’t like Lucretia doesn’t know they’re leaving—Lucas was quite… brusque about it, and Maureen feels a bit bad about it. It probably isn’t _wise_ to bring Lucretia along—she could bolt, after all, even though she’s not healed completely, and there’s nothing other than her own gut feeling that Lucretia won’t rat them out to any higher authorities or steal their research and profit from it.

She knows Lucas is right, still, to be wary. She’s made no real effort to extract promises of any sort from Lucretia about what she can and cannot speak about once she’s left. But it still feels cruel to leave her behind without saying goodbye.

So she leaves Lucas with the cart, and begins to check each of what she’s begun to think of as Lucretia’s haunts. Her room, of course; the general laboratories; the libraries and the sitting room; the bathing nook by the underground river. She’s nowhere to be found until she remembers Lucretia asking her offhandedly about the flower garden behind the cottage part of the compound.

Maureen finds Lucretia there, in the flower garden, a black bound book in her lap. Her hands are moving, healing leg stretched out in front of her.

Her fingers are smeared black with the stick of charcoal she holds, a sketch of the forest before her spread over the pages.

It’s one of the most serenely picturesque things Maureen has ever seen.  

She stops, breathless as she watches. Watches the way Lucretia’s fingers blend in shadows, how her wrist angles as she sweeps the charcoal in the arcs of the leaves of ferns, the tower of rocks that ivy crawls over. The piece of bread she tears off with her smudgy fingers, rolling it to pull up the pigment on the rocks.

Watches as she promptly pulls out another piece and eats it absently, eyes fixed on her paper.

She looks up, hand still moving with perfect precision, light glittering on her white-blond hair, curling in halos of light around her dark skin, let out of the braid she usually keeps her hair in. Her face is relaxed, the lines on her face almost nonexistent.

Maureen stares, heart in her throat. Lucretia usually seems cold and distant when she’s sitting and silent, like she’s some revenant from the afterworld, stern and judgmental to all who interrupt her contemplations.

But like this, sitting in the dirt amongst the dandelion and wild mint that she never weeded out of her garden, fingers dirty and hair loose,  she seems… peaceful. Human and warm and approachable.

Maureen is struck, suddenly and quickly and indelibly that this quiet, regal woman—the one who had no problems blowing up a door to break in; who had snarled and screamed and sweated; who knew interplanar arcane theorems and can argue about them with such certainty that it startles Maureen can sit like this, so quietly absorbed in the act of creation, that she puts the charcoal covered bread in her mouth.

“Oh, _eugh,_ ” Lucretia mutters, spitting it out into her palm.

Maureen finds herself smiling and pressing her hand to her mouth to stifle her laughter. Lucretia reminds her of a much younger woman in this moment, muttering to herself as she shakes off the half-chewed bread from her fingers, wiping them on the grass. She seems softer, more approachable, more like someone she could see keeping in her home.

She finally seems _whole_ , like someone Maureen could continue to see as an equal—not just in science and magic and knowledge, but in jokes and puns and all things mundane.

And god, Maureen is unsure how she’s never realized it before, but she’s beautiful. Her eyes are bright and her mouth is just as soft as it can be harsh, her small form elegant as she…

As Lucretia surreptitiously sticks her tongue out to wipe it against her shirt sleeve.

Maureen bursts out into unrestrained laughter, and Lucretia yelps, sketchbook slipping from her lap. She turns and stares at Maureen, mouth open in indignant shock.

“Hi, sorry,” Maureen chuckles, waving at Lucretia. “We’re going into town, if you’d like to come with us.”

“Uh, I…” Lucretia stammers, gathering up her papers.

“Oh, no, don’t do that, they’ll smear, won’t they?” Maureen asks, stepping forward.

“Um… Well, I… there’s a small spell I use, so,” Lucretia says softly. “They won’t.”

“May I?” Maureen asks, gesturing next to Lucretia.

“Oh, yes.”

Maureen settles on the ground next to Lucretia, crossing her legs in front of her. “Is this where you’ve been disappearing to when you’re not in the library?” she asks. “Drawing?”

“Not really,” Lucretia answers, rolling the charcoal between her fingers. “I go here and there, depending on how badly my leg is feeling. This is the first time I’ve been able to make it all the way out here.”  

“Do you draw, all the time?”

Lucretia shrugs, slowly turning to a new page. “Sometimes I read,” she answers. “Mostly, I think, when you can’t find me, I’m sleeping.”

“Sometimes you also solve mine and Lucas’ math gremlins,” Maureen teases.

Lucretia looks over at her, grinning at her mischievously. The sun glows around her, creating a halo around her and Maureen is struck by how absolutely different Lucretia is like this.

“That,” she says precisely, “Was an act of self preservation.”

Maureen laughs, “I’ve been meaning to ask: is it a regular habit to perform acts of self-preservation like that, or did you just decide it’d be a shitty way to beef it?”

Lucretia gives a noncommittal hum and a shrug, already working on sketching something else. “Depends on how disastrous the result would be if I ignored it,” she says slowly.

Maureen props her elbow on her knee, balancing her cheek against her knuckles, watching Lucretia’s profile. Lucretia’s lips curl up in a satisfied smirk, hand moving deftly across the page.

“So, if you could outrun the blast, you’d leave it? ‘Cause that’s what I’m hearing.”

“Well, “Lucretia laughs, “I’m not outrunning much right now, so it _might_ become a regular thing.”

“We don’t make _that_ many mistakes,” Maureen scoffs.

“You don’t make mistakes, but when you do make mistakes, you make them count, right?”

“Exactly.”

Maureen laughs again, loud and exuberantly amused. Lucretia laughs as well, a pleased smile on her lips as she draws. Maureen watches her sketch a quick background, a blank place in between the rough lines.

Lucretia looks up, eyes studying Maureen for a second, dark and intense, the same smile on her lips. She then turns back to her drawing.

Maureen watches her, bemused at the way Lucretia keeps darting glances at her, until she starts to see a figure emerge in the blank spot. “Me?”

“You got in the way of the view,” Lucretia says with a shy laugh.

Maureen’s lips twitch up, peeking up at Lucretia, who meets her eyes  with a duck of her head. “I could have moved,” she says, watching Lucretia start to sketch in the lines of her clothes, the fall of her hair over her shoulder.

“Oh, no, it’s fine,” Lucretia says softly. “I wanted to. I haven’t drawn you from life yet.”

“From life?” Maureen asks, quirking an eyebrow.

Lucretia gestures towards one of the books by her ankles. “They’re from memory,” she says.

Maureen gingerly opens a sketchbook, gasping as she pages through it. Charcoals and inks, and graphite drawing fill the book. She doesn’t recognize some of them, a man in a skullcap and a wand, scowling, a faceless ball-jointed figure behind a chess board, a drake, large and snarling; something that Maureen remembers she found beautiful, but she can’t remember what it was. Intricate, figured diagrams of things Maureen recognizes as some of her and Lucas’ inventions, better than their own patent diagrams spread a few pages of space. Seven pages with dark ink sketch out strangely innocuous objects—a monocle, a gauntlet, a bell, a sash, a chalice, a pebble, and a long, twisted rod of what looks like wood from the grain traced along the drawing—Maureen isn’t sure why Lucretia drew them, but she can tell they’re important from the detail put into them, the surety of the lines and shadings. She can feel power off of the drawings, in the grooves of the lines and the empty space around each.

After those, her home. Her lab, the bench where she cuts the stones, where Lucas welds. Their test tubes and the messy library bench where she pours over research. The garden and the slag heap in the back. The empty shaft with the glittering crystals and the mining equipment in the back storage room. The waterfall and the pools around it, Lucas laughing, Lucas working, Lucas beaming at something.

She knows her son’s face and expressions and the quirks of his mouth, and Lucretia has captured him perfectly, better than the few portraits they’ve ever sat for. The way his nose is crooked from where he broke it as a child and failed to tell her or her father, Roman; the mole under his eye and the way his smile is lopsided when he’s happiest. All of it is there, on paper. 

“These are wonderful,” she says softly, tapping a sketch of Lucas tinkering with the hand scanner Lucretia had blown up. “Wow, I… when you said you painted, I… _wow_.”

“Thank you,” Lucretia murmurs. She bites her lip, and watches as Maureen traces her finger above the page. “You can… if you’d like, you can keep those, of Lucas. As a, uh, well. An apology. For breaking precisely ‘ _all the shit'_.”

Maureen snickers at Lucretia’s cocked fingers and head as she speaks, quoting an earlier complaint made by Lucas. Her amusement at Lucas’ complaint is obvious on her face, and Maureen is glad that Lucretia seems to like her son. “May I really? These are… these are wonderful, better than what I’ve commissioned before. Thank you so much.”  

“You two are very close,” Lucretia says softly.

“We’re family,” Maureen says simply, watching Lucretia’s fingers smudge a shadow in. “I mean, I’m his mother, I’m biased. But, we’re all that we have.”

She looks up, sighing softly. She’s avoided talking about Lucas, about her family, more than she has to, but she thinks it’s only  a fair trade, given the gifts of insight Lucretia’s given her today.

“We’re what’s left of the Millers,” she muses. “Lucas and I have sort of been out here on our own for a while. We go out to town, have a few contacts out there, but. Eventually, it got to the point where we  couldn’t do what we did in a village or a big citadel city like Neverwinter. It got dangerous, so we had to flee. Our work got too big, too dangerous, and… it backfired in a big way.”

Lucretia looks over at Maureen, her face pursed in thought. “Pardon me if this is a bit forward, but you wouldn’t happen to be the same Miller family that ran the scientific foundation a few years ago, would you? The one that specialized in planar physics—I didn’t want to _assume_ , but,” she says, giving a quiet laugh. “The lab and your notes… All the research and everything you’ve talked about, I’m… I’m correct, aren’t I?”

Maureen studies Lucretia for a moment.  “You knew? All this time?”

“I’m sorry, Maureen,” Lucretia says softly. “I did, in a way.”

Maureen sighs slowly and looks away. “Yes. Yes, that’s… that’s us. Most people have forgotten about it. We didn’t make a whole lot of headway, not really, and when my husband died in a civil skirmish, it all just sort of fell apart. We were sort of just running on connections—a lot of our researchers were in the militia with him, in his cohort.”

Lucretia raises an eyebrow as she absently rubs her thumb and forefinger against her charcoal. “That’s a shame,” she says softly. “I remember being intrigued at the time. Not enough, obviously, to go then, but… even still, it’s a shame.”

Maureen pulls her knees up and cups her arms around them, looking out to the forest.

“It’s the Miller curse, really,” she says, her lips quirking up with dry humor. “We do one thing, and that’s all we’re remembered for, regardless of what else we try to do. And nothing ever quite works like that first thing does. Started with my great-granddad, right? He invented the elevator, and sure, that’s what people remember Roman Miller for…”

She sighs again and shrugs.  “He invented other things, but nothing got quite the recognition as that first one did. Lucas’ dad Lucian was one to—he was an artificer, and he specialized in making spell containers and items that you could take the spells out of. Grandpa and dad did other stuff too, but the Millers are still the Elevator People. And there’s me,” she says. “I do theoretical stuff, mostly with the plane of magic—which is how Lucian and I met, ages and ages ago. And Lucas, well, Lucas…”

“Lucas is going to be better than any of us combined,” Maureen says proudly. She grins, wide and bright. “He wants to change everything, completely revolutionize all of Faerun. I think he can, once he’s older. He’s smarter than me or his dad, really.”

Lucretia looks over and smiles. “You two love each other a lot, don’t you?” she whispers. “I… do you realize how lucky, just how wonderful that is?”

“What?”

Lucretia reaches over and turns the page of the sketchbook, smiling softly. “You see, I’ve learned in my life that… we take our capacity to love each other for granted, sometimes, and that… to be unaware of it is probably the biggest tragedy of all.”

Lucretia looks over and laughs softly at the look on Maureen’s face. “I took my family for granted, Maureen. I miss them terribly, and I lost them. You and Lucas have been terribly kind to me, and I…” she shrugs.

“You want to repay us,” Maureen says softly. Something in her twists and flutters and softens. Lucretia is so different than the feral woman who snarled and snarked and cold shouldered them at first.

“Yes,” Lucretia answers. “Even if it’s just something small, like listening to you dote on your son or helping you with equations. I can’t begin to repay the care you’ve given me.”

Maureen looks down at the sketchbook and turns the pages slowly, trying to formulate a reply.  Instead, she  gasps, fingers tracing across the page a few inches over the sketches themselves. “Oh, _wow_ ,” she murmurs.

It’s her, two spread pages of sketches of her. Some are with Lucas, but they’re all her. Working, eating. There’s one of her out in the garden, picking up herbs. Her slumped over her work table, her with a mug of tea, leaning against the corner and watching Lucas work on something small and clockwork.

Her eyes are tugged towards one, one of her leaning over, her hair falling in small ringlets from her braid, glasses perched on the tip of her nose. Her mouth is grim, and her brow is furrowed tight. There’s a smear of blood across her cheek, and Maureen remembers being frustrated that she’d wiped her face without rinsing her hands, but she’s also struck with how beautifully stern she looks.

“Is… was this how I looked to you? That day?” she asks, awestruck.

“Mmhmm. I don’t remember much, other than looking up and seeing you,” Lucretia admits. “It was very striking.”

“It’s… I—you drew me, you _draw_ me so beautifully,” Maureen marvels.

“I draw you like you are,” Lucretia says simply.  

“That’s… certainly… Something,” Maureen murmurs, heat creeping up her cheeks, unrelated to the sunshine on her neck. She’s never been insecure, but she’s also not prone to think of herself in terms like beautiful or attractive—she’s more likely to think sturdy and clever. “Not at all how I mentally see myself.”

She sits back and watches Lucretia in silence. Lucretia doesn’t say anything either, simply drawing as time passes on.

“ _Mom!”_

Maureen looks over her shoulder and swears as she jumps to her feet. “Shit, I have to go,” she says. “I came to tell you we were leaving but—but would you like to come along? We’re going into town, and… I mean, maybe we can get you something? Clothes or some sort of food you want?”

Lucretia closes her sketchbook and sets it aside. She shuffles onto her knees, wincing as she moves her injured leg.  
  
“Here, here, let me help,” Maureen says, holding out her hands.

Lucretia looks up and purses her lips. “I’m okay,” she says cautiously.

“No, please,” Maureen insists, leaning down.

Lucretia tentatively holds out her hands. Maureen holds them tightly, pulling her to her feet carefully. “Hold onto my arms,” she says as Lucretia sways unsteadily as she rises. “It’s okay to hold onto me, I won’t let you fall.”

Lucretia grips her forearms, grimacing as she puts weight on her foot. “Thank you,” she murmurs.

“Did you bring your cane out?”

“I’m afraid not,” Lucretia says softly. “I guess I should stay here…”

“You wanted to go?”

Lucretia’s silence is enough of an answer for Maureen.

“You’re allowed,” Maureen says gently; “To ask for things.”

Lucretia tips her head and gives a rueful smile, “Am I really?”

Maureen nods. She smiles down at Lucretia, lifting one hand to touch her cheek very briefly. “For the moment, you are a Miller,” she says softly. “You’re one of ours right now.”

“Then, I think, I’d like to go along,” Lucretia answers, her voice just as hushed.

Something within Maureen trembles, a leaf in the wind—it leaves her feeling raw and awed and nervous, her arms hooked around Lucretia’s waist as they walk forward. Her face and neck stays warm, long after they’d left the sunlit clearing behind, the quaking, nameless feeling molten behind her teeth.


End file.
